Vice Epistemology 1138504432, 9781138504431

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Vice Epistemology

Some of the most problematic human behaviors involve vices of the mind such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. What sorts of things are epistemic vices? How do we detect and mitigate them? How and why do these vices prevent us from acquiring knowledge, and what is their role in sustaining patterns of ignorance? What is their relation to implicit or unconscious bias? How do epistemic vices and systems of social oppression relate to one another? Do we unwittingly absorb such traits from the process of socialization and communities around us? Are epistemic vices traits for which we can be blamed? Can there be institutional and collective epistemic vices? This book seeks to answer these important questions about the vices of the mind and their roles in our social and epistemic lives, and is the first collection of its kind. Organized into four parts, chapters by outstanding scholars explore the nature of epistemic vices, specific examples of these vices, and case studies in applied vice epistemology, including education and politics. Alongside these foundational questions, the volume offers sophisticated accounts of vices both new and familiar. These include epistemic arrogance and servility, epistemic injustice, epistemic snobbishness, conspiratorial thinking, procrastination, and forms of closed-mindedness. Vice Epistemology is essential reading for students of ethics, epistemology, and virtue theory, and various areas of applied, feminist, and social philosophy. It will also be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and activists in politics, law, and education. Ian James Kidd is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. Heather Battaly is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, USA. Quassim Cassam is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK.

Vice Epistemology

Edited by Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly and Quassim Cassam; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly and Quassim Cassam to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kidd, Ian James, 1983- editor. | Battaly, Heather D., 1969- editor. | Cassam, Quassim, editor. Title: Vice epistemology / edited by Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020016484 (print) | LCCN 2020016485 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138504431 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315146058 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Vices. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC BD176 .V53 2020 (print) | LCC BD176 (ebook) | DDC 179/.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016484 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016485 ISBN: 978-1-138-50443-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14605-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed … Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §200 (Lafuma)

For all those of us struggling against the vices of the mind

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: from epistemic vices to vice epistemology

xi xiv 1

IAN JAMES KIDD, HEATHER BATTALY, AND QUASSIM CASSAM

PART I

Foundational issues

19

1

21

The structure of intellectual vices JASON BAEHR

2

The metaphysical foundations of vice epistemology

37

QUASSIM CASSAM

3

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege: vice epistemology and the epistemology of ignorance

53

ALESSANDRA TANESINI

4

Epistemic corruption and social oppression

69

IAN JAMES KIDD

PART II

Collectives, institutions, and networks

87

5

89

Institutional epistemic vices: the case of inferential inertia MIRANDA FRICKER

x

Contents

6

Capital vices, institutional failures, and epistemic neglect in a county jail

108

JOSÉ MEDINA

7

Implicit bias and epistemic vice

126

JULES HOLROYD

8

Vectors of epistemic insecurity

148

EMILY SULLIVAN AND MARK ALFANO

PART III

Analyses of specific vices

165

9

167

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off HEATHER BATTALY

10 Epistemic insensitivity: an insidious and consequential vice

189

MAURA PRIEST

11 Intellectual snobs

208

CHARLIE CRERAR

PART IV

Applied vice epistemology

223

12 Teaching to the test: how schools discourage phronesis

225

CASEY JOHNSON

13 Vices of questioning in public discourse

239

LANI WATSON

Index

259

Contributors

Ian James Kidd is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests include character epistemology, feminist ethics and social philosophy, and Buddhist and classical Chinese philosophies. Earlier edited collections include The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice (with José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr.). His website is www.ianjameskidd.weebly.com. Heather Battaly is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. She is author of Virtue (Polity 2015) and editor of Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic (Blackwell 2010) and The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (2019). She works on virtues and vices in epistemology and ethics. Quassim Cassam is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of six books, including Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford 2019), Conspiracy Theories (Polity 2019), and Self-Knowledge for Humans (Oxford 2014). As well as vice epistemology, his research interests include the philosophy of terrorism and extremism. Mark Alfano is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia. He uses tools and methods from philosophy, psychology, and computer science to explore topics in social epistemology, moral psychology, and digital humanities. His books include Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge 2013) and Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge 2019). Jason Baehr is a Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He specializes in theoretical and applied virtue epistemology. He is author of The Inquiring Mind (Oxford 2011) and editor of Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (Routledge 2016). From 2012 to 2015, he directed the Intellectual Virtues and Education Project at LMU, which involved founding the Intellectual Virtues Academy, a public charter middle school in Long Beach, CA. He is currently working on two books: a second monograph in theoretical virtue epistemology and a book for teachers, provisionally titled Deep in Thought: A Philosophical

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Contributors and Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues (under contract with Harvard Education Press).

Charlie Crerar is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Connecticut. He works primarily on issues in virtue and social epistemology. Recent publications include a collection on Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice (Cambridge 2018, co-edited with Simon Barker and Trystan Goetze), and papers on epistemic injustice, intellectual charity, and intellectual vice. Miranda Fricker is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research is primarily in moral philosophy, feminist philosophy, and social epistemology. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford 2007); coauthor of Reading Ethics: Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary (WileyBlackwell 2009); and co-editor of a number of edited collections, most recently The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (2019). She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Jules Holroyd is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sheffield and co-director of its Centre for Engaged Philosophy, UK. Her teaching and research focus on questions concerning the ways in which we are implicated in injustices and span the topics of political philosophy, moral psychology, and social philosophy (in particular, feminist philosophy and philosophy of race). She has published extensively on discrimination, implicit bias, moral responsibility, and feminist ethics. Casey Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Idaho. Her main areas of interest include social epistemology and feminist philosophy of language. Casey was the editor of the volume Voicing Dissent: The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public (Routledge 2018). Her current work concerns our obligations to meet one another’s epistemic needs. José Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor at Northwestern University, Illinois. He works primarily in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, communication theory, and social epistemology. His books include The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford 2012). Current book projects include Racial Violence and Epistemic Activism and Theories of the Flesh: Latin-American and US Latina Feminist Theories (with Andrea Pitts and Mariana Ortega). Maura Priest is an Assistant Professor and bioethicist in the Department of Philosophy in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her research interests span biomedical ethics (especially disability, disability and mental health, and paediatric issues), normative

Contributors

xiii

and applied ethics, and virtue ethics and epistemology. Her forthcoming book is Can We Trust Elites? (Routledge 2021). Emily Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. Her research explores the intersection between philosophy and data and computer science and investigates how explanations and data-driven models can promote and be designed for epistemic values. Alessandra Tanesini is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales. Her current work lies at the intersection of ethics, the philosophy of language, and epistemology with a focus on epistemic vice, silencing, prejudice, and ignorance. Her new book The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Lani Watson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research focuses on questions and questioning, drawing primarily on virtue, vice, and social epistemology. Her forthcoming book with Routledge is titled The Right to Know: Epistemic Rights and Why We Need Them. Her website is www.philosophyofquestions.com.

Acknowledgments

Ian is grateful to the University of Nottingham for a period of research leave. We are grateful to the University of Connecticut for sponsoring the Vice Epistemology Conference in April 2019. We thank all conference participants, especially our commentators: Teresa Allen, Josh Dolin, Yuhan Liang, Dan Licitra, Alice Monypenny, Heather Muraviov, Nate Sheff, Heather Spradley, Taylor Tate, and Cody Turner. We are also grateful to Adam Johnson and the team at Routledge for their excellent work.

Introduction From epistemic vices to vice epistemology Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam

This is the first volume dedicated to the emerging discipline of vice epistemology: the study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of epistemic vices. The most commonly discussed are perhaps arrogance, closedmindedness, and dogmatism, but there are many more. Some epistemic vices are esoteric, currently known only to those with specialist training – think of vices like testimonial injustice, epistemic self-indulgence, epistemic insensibility. To this list, one can add more familiar epistemic vices, such as conspiratorial thinking, wishful thinking, gullibility, or cynicism. Such vices of the mind contrast with epistemic virtues, the dispositions, attitudes, and ways of thinking that constitute excellences of epistemic character, like open-mindedness and intellectual humility. Taken together, epistemic virtues and vices are entrenched parts of our everyday ways of describing and assessing epistemic character. A defining feature of the vices of the mind is that they make us bad thinkers, insofar as they prevent us from acquiring and sharing knowledge, express bad motives and desires, or interfere with our individual and collective epistemic functioning, in all sorts of ways. Some are irksome, others are dangerous. Assessing the nature and scope of the badness of epistemic vices is a main task for vice epistemology. Closely related is the more ameliorative project of trying to identify effective ways to prevent them from developing or to weaken those already in place. These diagnostic and ameliorative efforts are integrated for the following reason: we worry about epistemic vices because we, and the people with whom we share the world, have them, and their effects alarm, anger, disturb, and distress us in all sorts of ways. The discipline of vice epistemology can be thought of as starting from these very general thoughts. Our epistemic behavior and character are integral to our lives as human beings at practically every level. Activities such as arguing, criticizing, and evaluating are essential to social intercourse, from the trivial to the momentous, and from the idiosyncratic to the universal. Our social and political existences depend on our being capable of effectively assessing, explaining, and understanding aspects of our world – from its economic structures to its legislative processes. Our moral agency requires us to be able to form reliable judgments of other people, to be able to engage in self-reflexive critical scrutiny of our own motives and actions, and to acquire and properly deploy knowledge and understanding of people and situations.

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Much of our moral wrongdoing involves epistemic failures, such as thoughtlessness, for instance. Moreover, the effective development and performance of some of our major shared institutions and projects also require us, individually and collectively, to have certain epistemic virtues and to avoid certain epistemic vices. The obvious examples, here, are such culturally prestigious epistemic projects as the modern scientific enterprise, but any large-scale cultural projects will require us to be knowers of certain sorts. The quality of our epistemic characters therefore affects, in complex and substantive ways, the wider course and quality of our lives, as individuals and as members of communities and cultures. How bad are epistemic vices? Such vices of the mind as arrogance and dogmatism are sometimes irritating but bearable, at least when they are confined to the office boor who knows it all, or the diehard music fan who won’t budge from their conviction that their favored band is best of all. Typically, though, epistemic vices will tend to have more severe effects. Arrogance and dogmatism can contribute to patterns of social exclusion and oppression – ramifying with wider patterns of racist and sexist bias, supercharged by cultural tendencies to political polarization, amplified by the suboptimal social and epistemic structures of modern life. In these cases, the vices of the mind contribute to serious, systematic patterns of injurious, often violent mistreatment, injustice, and oppression. If our thinking is not right, then much else is at risk. At this point, vice epistemology starts to merge into the new discipline of political epistemology (Hannon and de Ridder 2010). Stepping back from these large-scale social and political contexts, there are still many other reasons to worry about epistemic vices. Maybe we want to think well for its own sake – if, like Pascal, one believes that ‘to think well is the basic principle of morality’ (Pensées §200, Lafuma). Maybe we want to do our best to honor certain epistemic ideals, such as objectivity, integrity, or epistemic responsibility, the latter concept being one of the original motivators for early virtue epistemology (Code 1987). Maybe we are committed to aspirational normative ideals that require of us virtues of the mind as well as the heart, reflecting a vision of ourselves as creatures for whom a good life necessarily consists of epistemic as well as ethical excellences. Maybe we are interested in the vices of the mind because, when lined up alongside the ethical vices, they help to confirm a misanthropic vision of humankind as infused with failings and corruptions. All of these reasons, and others, can motivate the study of epistemic vices. We think there are many reasons to want to take epistemic vices seriously. Below, we take a quick tour through the historical study of epistemic vice, and the contemporary development of vice epistemology. We highlight key themes in contemporary work on epistemic vice and vice epistemology, and offer an overview of the volume’s chapters. We close with some open questions that warrant further exploration.

The historical study of epistemic vices: a brief tour The systematic study of epistemic failings and vices is nothing new since there have been implicit and explicit studies of epistemic failings in several of the

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 3 world’s philosophical traditions. Such investigations are not always articulated in the terms of contemporary vice epistemology, of course, since not all cultures recognize the distinction between ethical and epistemic vices. Kǒngzǐ, for instance, notes a set of vices that systematically interfere with individual epistemic agency, such as foolishness, rigidity, and lack of a love of learning, a deficient appetite for epistemic goods (Confucius §17.8).1 Similarly, the early Daoist, Zhuāngzǐ, describes an array of epistemic character traits opposed to the clarity of vision and lucidity proper to the sage, which can be articulated as vices like arrogance and dogmatism; on his analysis, these typically arise from failures to grasp the perspectival character of our perceptions, convictions, and evaluations. Within the early Buddhist texts of the authoritative Pali Canon, one finds very complex taxonomies of character failings, with the detailed listings of ‘cankers’, ‘taints’, ‘defilements’, and ‘fetters’ presented in the Majjhima Nikāya and Digha Nikāya (see Nyanatiloka 2004), accompanied by similar lists and condemnations in other texts, too.2 Such failings are ontologically diverse, since they include many kinds of things, including character traits, sensibilities, affective dispositions, and corrupted styles of thinking and attention. Keown (1991: 63f) argues that early Buddhism, at least, recognizes the twofold Aristotelian distinction: there are epistemic vices rooted in moha, ‘delusion’, and ethical vices rooted in lobha, ‘greed’, and dosa, ‘hatred’. All of our vices and failings are ultimately grounded in these three akusala-mūla or ‘unwholesome roots’ (see, e.g., Visuddhiamagga XXII, 49, 65). Moreover, other early Buddhist texts add other epistemic failings, which include various samyojana, ‘fetters’ – false and recalcitrant beliefs which entrap us within the cycle of rebirth, the most famous of which is the delusory belief in a substantial, persisting self (sakkāya-diṭṭhi). There are also incapacitating forms of doubt or uncertainty, especially about the Buddha’s awakeness and the nine supermundane consciousnesses (vicikicchā), as described in the Saṅgīti Sutta (e.g., Digha Nikaya 33). The early Buddhist texts of the Pali Canon therefore offer rich prospects for studies in cross-cultural vice epistemology, perhaps made all the more interesting by the specific soteriological context of that tradition and its concern with human salvation. After all, our ‘cankers’, ‘defilements’, and other vices and failings are fundamentally of concern because they perpetuate our entrapment within samsara, the cycle of rebirth and dukkha. In ancient Greece, Aristotle is known to have introduced the distinct category of epistemic virtues (Nicomachean Ethics VI), though it is worth exploring whether he had a corresponding notion of epistemic vices. Whether or not they had an explicit notion of epistemic vice, it is clear that Greek thinkers were sensitive to epistemic failings. Socrates, for one, castigates various forms of epistemically vicious behavior on the part of his interlocutors. A main target for him was ‘hubris’, a tendency towards inflated confidence in one’s beliefs, which, in the case of ethical knowledge, is manifested by Polus in Gorgias and Euthyphro in his eponymous dialogue. (Specific denunciations of dogmatism and hubris can also be found in Charmides 166c7–d2 and Alcibiades 1 118a4–5.) We could also,

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more speculatively, consider other ancient Greeks as having a pronounced hostility toward certain epistemic vices: think of Heraclitus’ criticisms of the foolishness of the masses and the dogmatism and conceit of ‘polymaths’ (McKirahan §§10.1–18), or the condemnations of the corrupting effects of learning and study that run through the apothegms of the Cynics. Bion, for instance, targets intellectual conceit (oiēsis), while Tiresias warns of the self-satisfaction that, for him, runs throughout too much ‘philosophico-jibber-jabber’ (quoted and referenced in Desmond 2014: 128, 65). Use of a vocabulary of vices to describe and criticize forms of objectionable epistemic behavior is one thing, of course, while the systematic philosophical study that uses an articulate framework of epistemic vice is quite another. Systematic vice theory really began, in the West at least, during the early Christian tradition, with a focus on ethical and spiritual vice (see DeYoung 2009). Arguably, the first fully fledged vice epistemologies were developed during the seventeenth century, likely with Sir Francis Bacon’s analysis of the ‘Idols of the Mind’ (idola mentis), in Sections 34 to 55 of his Novum Organum of 1620. Although few scholars of his work interpret the Idols in character-epistemic terms, many of them are clearly individual and collective epistemic vices and failings. Indeed, the Idols are defined by two scholars as ‘impediments of various kinds which interfere with the processes of clear human reasoning’ (Jardine and Silverthorne in Bacon 2000 [1620]: xix). Bacon’s sensitivity to our innate and acquired epistemic vices and failings was taken up in early modern English natural philosophy. The exploration of epistemic vices and failings found its way into John Locke’s influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which addresses the ‘Vices [that] oppose or menace our Endeavours’ (Essay § 3.4.18), and into Locke’s surveys of various epistemic vices in his educational essay, Of the Conduct of the Understanding (Locke 1996, Locke 2008). An important tradition also emerged in early modern feminist vice epistemology, mostly focused on education, represented by Mary Astell’s 1694 study, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and, just over a century later, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Astell 2002, Wollstonecraft 1995). Each is notable for its sensitivity to the gendered character of certain epistemic vices and the ways that, under the influence of misogynistic social norms, the forms of education afforded to women tended to be deeply epistemically corrupting (see Kidd 2019). These two early modern English traditions in vice epistemology are complex and integrated with wider philosophical debates about natural science, education, and the social and political rights of women. They invite more extensive study both by vice epistemologists and specialist historians of philosophy. The subsequent tale of vice epistemology is less clear, from the late eighteenth century onwards, despite a clear enduring interest in arrogance, dogmatism, and related vices. And even if vice epistemology went cold during that period, that in itself demands explanation. In the course of those investigations, we are confident that other precursor ventures into vice epistemology will be revealed.

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 5

The contemporary development of vice epistemology: a brief tour What is clear, though, is that the modern emergence of vice epistemology traces its roots to the development of its sister discipline, virtue epistemology. In the early 1980s, various internal developments within analytic epistemology led to a desire for new ways to think about seemingly intractable problems. A crucial moment was Ernest Sosa’s (1980) paper, ‘The Raft and the Pyramid’, soon to be followed by early formative work aimed at thickening epistemology by Lorraine Code (1987) and James Montmarquet (1987). Highlighting the thenneglected theme of epistemic responsibility, roughly modeled on similar themes in ethics, Code and Montmarquet set the stage for Linda Zagzebski’s now-classic book, Virtues of the Mind (1996). More than anything else, this established virtue epistemology as a new, distinctive area for epistemologists, inspiring systematic work on the nature of epistemic (or intellectual) virtue and, later, sustained studies of specific character virtues. Some crucial later studies were Robert Roberts and W. Jay Wood’s (2007) Intellectual Virtues, and Jason Baehr’s (2011) The Inquiring Mind. The epistemic, or intellectual, vices were generally rather recessive in these foundational studies other than an article by Casey Swank (2000). (We use ‘epistemic’ and ‘intellectual’ interchangeably, as applied to virtues and vices.) An honorable exception is Miranda Fricker’s landmark Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), which inspired new interest in the sources, nature, and correction of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice (see Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus 2017). Although Fricker’s theoretical framework was feminist virtue epistemology, few subsequent scholars took up her invitation to conceive of testimonial injustice (the main form she focuses on) as an epistemic vice (see Battaly 2017 for a corrective study). It was therefore welcome when, in 2013, José Medina’s The Epistemology of Resistance drew upon a variety of sources – from Fricker to critical race theory and social epistemology – to offer perhaps the first substantive study of epistemic vices. Medina’s book applies a sophisticated vice-theoretical framework to analyze gendered and racial oppression and social activism, giving specific attention to the ways that epistemic character and agency are shaped, for better or worse, by the subject’s location within social practices and systems of power. The interest in epistemic vices represented by Fricker and Medina tended to locate vice epistemology within the vicinity of feminist and race epistemologies. But another crucial theoretical advance in the development of vice epistemology was an important series of papers by Heather Battaly that drew upon the resources of Aristotelian virtue theory. With this work, vice epistemology really got going, although the field was not named until the publication of Quassim Cassam’s paper ‘Vice Epistemology’ (2016). Battaly charted the varieties of epistemic vice, described the major models for normative appraisal of epistemic character traits, and developed original accounts of several neglected vices, such as epistemic self-indulgence and epistemic insensibility (see Battaly 2010, 2013, 2014). Since

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this brings us up to the present day, we now turn to survey the main themes of contemporary vice epistemology.

Key themes in contemporary vice epistemology The agenda of vice epistemology has thus far been influenced by two main factors. First, it has inherited a set of questions from the disciplines of virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and social epistemology. These include questions about the nature of a vice, the ways that social structures affect ethical and epistemic agency, and the ways that epistemic character relates to debates about knowledge or justification. Jason Baehr once proposed thinking of virtue epistemology as having ‘conservative’ and ‘autonomous’ forms: the former construes epistemic virtues as significant insofar as they illuminate the agenda of analytic epistemology, the latter recognizes that the virtues of the mind are of interest independently of their significance to those debates (Baehr 2011: §1.2.2). The same could be said of vice epistemology. Some of the current work engages with issues like the justification of our beliefs, but there is also ‘autonomous’ work, for instance, on epistemic vice and social oppression. The second factor – or set of factors – that have clearly informed the agenda and concerns of vice epistemology are wider cultural and political developments. This is clearest in such modern ills as ‘post-truth politics’ and ‘epistemic bubbles’, exemplifications of epistemic vice by major figures in (for instance) the British and American political establishment, and decisive political events whose explanation requires appeals to the arrogance, dogmatism, and other vices of political actors.3 This is not to say that vice epistemology owes its contemporary fortunes solely to those cultural and political developments, but they do underscore an important point about the epistemically vicious character of the contemporary social world. Cultural concern can also motivate an interest in virtues, of course, as Bernard Williams demonstrated in Truth and Truthfulness – but the fact that concern has shifted from virtues of truth to vices of truth says something about how things have changed since the publication of that book (the cultural context of concerns about truthfulness as a virtue are mainly discussed in Williams 2002: ch.1). We could therefore say that if virtue epistemology developed alongside social epistemology, then perhaps vice epistemology should develop alongside an anti-social epistemology (see Alfano, Klein, and de Ridder Forthcoming). Thus far, contemporary work in vice epistemology has centered around three key themes. 1 Foundational work on the structure and features of epistemic vices, and their impact on knowledge. 2 Analyses of specific epistemic vices. 3 Case studies in applied vice epistemology. 1 Much of the extant work in vice epistemology has explored questions related to the first theme – the structure and features of epistemic vice. For starters,

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 7 theorists have offered competing views of what makes epistemic vices bad. Some have argued that bad motivations are constituent components of epistemic vices (Battaly 2014; Crerar 2018; Tanesini 2018b), while others have argued that epistemic vices are bad because they obstruct justified belief and knowledge (Cassam 2016, 2019a). Vice epistemologists have likewise begun to explore whether agents are blameworthy for their epistemic vices, paying special attention to different notions of blameworthiness – some that involve control and accountability, and others that do not (Battaly 2016, 2019; Cassam 2019a; Holroyd 2017; Fricker 2007, 2016). Though there is disagreement over several of the main features of epistemic vice, much of the field is united in thinking that epistemic vices can be stealthy or self-concealing; it is commonly held that an agent’s being (e.g.) closed-minded makes it difficult for her to detect this vice in herself (Fricker 2007; Cassam 2019a; Holroyd 2017; Medina 2013). Something similar may be true for the vice of willful hermeneutical ignorance, the refusal of dominantly situated knowers to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally (Pohlhaus Jr. 2012). More generally, though extant work in the field has tended to focus on the vices of individual agents, this focus is neither exclusive nor necessary. Scholars working at the intersection of vice epistemology and social epistemology have argued that the possession of epistemic vices isn’t limited to individual agents – groups can have epistemic vices, too (Fricker 2010; Lahroodi 2019). Finally, theorists have begun to offer some strategies for ameliorating epistemic vices (Cassam 2019a; Holroyd 2016; Sherman and Goguen 2019), recognizing that these strategies must be sensitive to whatever features the vices end up having, and to whatever conditions end up facilitating the vices (Kidd 2018a). 2 The nascent literature on vice epistemology has likewise begun to provide analyses of specific epistemic vices. Much of this work has focused on two families of vices – the vices of epistemic injustice, and the vices associated with the virtue of intellectual humility. As indicated above, Fricker’s (2007) and Medina’s (2013) accounts of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice have generated a substantial literature of their own. With respect to the vices associated with intellectual humility, Alessandra Tanesini (2016) has analyzed intellectual arrogance and haughtiness, and intellectual timidity and servility (2018a), while Roberts and Wood (2019) have explored what they call ‘vices of pride’, such as domination and hyper-autonomy. Also on offer are analyses of the vices of closed-mindedness (Battaly 2018; Cassam 2019a), gullibility (Cassam 2019a), epistemic malevolence (Baehr 2010), epistemic intemperance (Bloomfield 2019), and epistemic self-indulgence (Battaly 2010). 3 Vice epistemologists have also begun to apply their analyses of specific epistemic vices to important domains of our lives. One of the main reasons to be interested in epistemic vices is because we are often worried about epistemically vicious people – dogmatic politicians, arrogant doctors, lazy media consumers, and so on. Vicious people create problems in the world, and much

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Kidd, Battaly, and Cassam of the modern interest in vice epistemology reflects these sorts of practical concerns. Accordingly, several theorists have examined epistemic vices in the domain of political discourse, including Cassam (2019b) who focuses on conspiratorial thinking, and Michael Lynch (2019) who explores arrogance. With respect to online discourse, Thi Nguyen (2018) has explored epistemic vices connected to echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. In the domain of education, Battaly (2013) has tackled epistemic insensibility in higher education policy in Britain and the US (see further Baehr 2015 and Kotzee 2013). Biddle, Kidd, and Leuschner (2017) argue that attacks on climate scientists by a variety of sceptics, deniers, and ‘doubt-mongers’ are intended to cause those scientists to develop the vice of epistemic timidity, while Kidd and Carel (2014) explore the vices of epistemic injustice within clinical and healthcare practice. Kidd (2016, 2017, 2018c) develops a methodology for charging others with epistemic vice and uses it to assess charges of arrogance and dogmatism against advocates of scientism.

Summary of chapters Part I concerns foundational issues in vice epistemology, starting with ontological questions about the sorts of things that epistemic vices are. In his chapter, Jason Baehr argues that the structure of intellectual vices does not mirror the structure of intellectual virtues. For Baehr, possessing an intellectual virtue requires excellence along ‘four-dimensions’ – virtue requires the motivation for epistemic goods, good judgment, competence, and proper affect. In contrast, possessing an intellectual vice does not require being defective along all four of these dimensions. Baehr suggests that defective epistemic motivation can itself be sufficient for intellectual vice. He likewise explores whether defective epistemic motivation is necessary for possessing intellectual vice, tackling counter-examples proposed in the recent literature. A starting point is the set of ontological questions concerning the nature of epistemic vices. Quassim Cassam initiated ‘vice ontology’ in an earlier paper (Cassam 2017) and in his chapter for this volume offers a systematic set of reflections on the three main questions in that project: what kinds of things are epistemic vices, how are they individuated, to what are those distinctions answerable? Consistent with his earlier work, Cassam defends vice-pluralism – the conviction that epistemic vices can be many kinds of things, including character traits, attitudes, and ways of thinking (Aristotle, by contrast, was a vice-monist, regarding all vices as character traits). The individuation of vices can rely on direct or indirect approaches, where the former focus on the vice itself and the latter on our vice-concepts, like ‘closedmindedness’. This depends on the question of what our vice-concepts are answerable to – a vital matter when we are confronted with rival accounts of some vice. Cassam endorses the midway position that our vice-concepts depend on the combination of our conceptual resources (especially the vice-concepts we have contingently inherited) and empirical realities about people’s psychology and conduct. Cassam ends by emphasizing that, however

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 9 complex epistemic vices are, they are only ever one of many styles of explanation for people’s objectionable epistemic conduct. The others include situational, ideological, moral, and political-rational explanations – a pluralism that a vice epistemologist does well to honor. Alessandra Tanesini’s chapter, ‘Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege’, traces out some connections between vice epistemology and the epistemology of ignorance. She starts by arguing that certain epistemic vices are best construed as sensibilities, and that these play a role in many forms of ‘active’ or ‘motivated ignorance’. Epistemically vicious sensibilities make a person insensitive to what is salient, given their epistemic goals, and they can ramify with epistemically vicious attitudes. Tanesini argues that a set of psychological and social relations between ignorance, arrogance, and privilege help to generate and sustain two specific vices – ‘racial insensitivity’ and ‘intellectual arrogance’. Her account then concludes by noting important investigative directions for further studies of relationships between the epistemologies of vice and ignorance. Continuing the theme of the social dimensions of epistemic vice, Ian James Kidd’s ‘Epistemic corruption and social oppression’ explores the role vice epistemology can play in understanding the impact of social oppression on epistemic character. Kidd maps several ways in which oppressive conditions can be ‘epistemically corrupting’ – i.e., can facilitate the development and exercise of epistemic vices. He argues that combating this corruption requires a specific kind of vice epistemology, a ‘critical character epistemology’. One that is simultaneously sensitive to the different ways in which vices develop in differently situated agents, informed by the epistemic and non-epistemic harms of vices, and alive to the possibility that whether a trait counts as a vice might depend on context. Part II explores epistemic vices at the collective, institutional, and network levels. Everyone who accepts the existence of epistemic vices agrees that their bearers include individual epistemic agents. But what about vice-bearers at wider levels? Most accounts of epistemic vices are individualist in their orientation: they focus on the epistemic vices of individuals. One might wonder, however, whether institutions or collectives can also be epistemically vicious and, if so, what their epistemic vices might be. These issues are taken up by Miranda Fricker, José Medina, Jules Holroyd, and Emily Sullivan, and Mark Alfano. In her contribution, Fricker asks why one might care about the question whether institutions can be said to have vices of any kind. As she notes, the idea of an institutional vice has at least a tentative foothold in public discourse about institutions. In developing her account, she draws heavily on the notion of an institutional ethos, understood as the institutional analogue of an individual’s character. An institution’s ethos consists of the collective dispositions, values, and evaluative attitudes that orientate its activities. Fricker argues that institutional epistemic vices are displayed ‘whenever there are culpable lapses in the institution’s epistemic ethos and/or in the implementation of ends’. One such vice is inferential inertia, which she argues is rapidly becoming part of our normal institutional environment. In one notorious case involving the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC), the informational compartmentalization of the institution

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ensured that scattered items of information about a sexual predator never amassed into a body of evidence, but instead remained dispersed and inferentially inert within the organization. As this example illustrates, inferential inertia is an institutional vice that needs to be distinguished and properly understood, especially when public trust in institutions is in decline. The institutional vice that Medina highlights is incredulity, which is a specific form of the epistemic vice of testimonial insensitivity. This can be both a personal and an institutional failing. Medina gives the example a detention facility inmate whose medical emergency was ignored by the guards on duty despite repeated pleas for help from other inmates. In this case, the institution itself, and not just the particular detention officers who happened to be on duty, exhibited the epistemic vice of incredulity. The incredulity of individual guards who ignored pleas for help for a distressed inmate vitiated their proper epistemic functioning as well as their epistemic relationship with inmates. The sense in which the institution exhibited the epistemic vice of incredulity is that it lacked adequate protocols for handling emergency calls, trained its guards not to trust or empathize with inmates, and operated deficient accountability procedures. Since the institution did not treat inmates as trustworthy it became ill-equipped to ‘carry out properly basic epistemic operations required for providing care and protection for the inmates’. This is a capital institutional vice where, as in the present case, it paralyzes or vitiates the institution’s overall epistemic functioning. Such vices can be corrected by various forms of what Medina calls epistemic activism. This is much more than consciousness raising. It is ‘an attempt to meliorate epistemic dynamics and institutional frameworks so that capital epistemic vices are uprooted and the work towards epistemic justice can begin’. In her chapter, Jules Holroyd focuses on collective rather than institutional vices. Her question is whether implicit biases are epistemic vices. This is not an easy question since implicit biases are heterogeneous, and different vice epistemologists offer different accounts of epistemic vice. Holroyd puts pressure on the idea that the implicit biases of individuals are epistemic vices by noting the low predictive validity of implicit biases and the low test–retest reliability of measures of implicit bias. However, this leaves it open that implicit biases are collective epistemic vices. A collective or group C can be said to have vice V to the extent that C is disposed to behave in ways characteristic of V. Collective vices as Holroyd understands them do not require joint commitment to a bad end or motive. Instead, they can emerge through negligence, via ‘hidden hand’ mechanisms. Holroyd concludes by noting that being able to call out collectives as epistemically vicious may serve an important ameliorative function in addressing the problematic patterns of bias in which we are implicated. Rounding off Part II, Emily Sullivan and Mark Alfano point out that we often rely on networks of other agents in arriving at our beliefs, both on-line and offline. Their chapter develops the concept of an insecure epistemic network – in which one relies on very few independent sources, as in an echo chamber or star-network. Sullivan and Alfano argue that an insecure network can negatively impact one’s epistemic well-being, by making one less intellectually autonomous

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 11 and less likely to get true beliefs. They explore virtues and vices that are connected to monitoring, adjusting, and restructuring one’s own epistemic networks and those of others. Along the way, they distinguish epistemic security from epistemic safety. Part III offers studies of specific epistemic vices. Heather Battaly opens with an analysis of three closely related epistemic character traits – quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off. Each reflects different ways to lack the trait of perseverance. Battaly’s argument is that these three traits are not always epistemically vicious and might under certain conditions be virtuous. She draws on the virtue-theoretic concept of akrasia and some concerns about the ‘fit’ between traits and hostile epistemic environments to pose complicated questions about our appraisals of the normative status of epistemic traits, then ends with a genealogy of some related traits, such as apathy, folly, complacency, and resignation. All of this suggests, against Aristotle, that there are several vices of deficiency for the trait of perseverance, if not for others, too. In her chapter, Maura Priest argues that epistemic insensitivity is an interpersonal, or other-regarding, epistemic vice – one that tends to negatively impact the epistemic endeavors of other agents. She conceives of epistemic insensitivity as a tendency to fail to recognize, or fail to respond appropriately to, other agents’ epistemic concerns. Priest explores several manifestations of this vice, including expertise insensitivity, which occurs when (e.g.) an expert is oblivious to or doesn’t care that she is using terms of art that her interlocutor fails to understand. Priest likewise distinguishes the vice of epistemic insensitivity from the vices of oversensitivity, incivility, and arrogance. Is intellectual snobbery a specifically intellectual vice? Charlie Crerar argues that it is. It is an intellectual vice that affects the practice of making intellectual evaluations. For Crerar, what makes someone an intellectual snob is not the content or even the strength of their intellectual evaluations, but rather the considerations upon which these evaluations are based. A ‘snobbery of motives’ is one form of intellectual snobbery. A person who is an intellectual snob in this sense is not only disposed to appraise things on the basis of their intellectual status, but does out of a desire to feel or appear superior to some other individual or group. A different type of intellectual snobbery consists in a ‘snobbery of sensibilities’. This consists in what Crerar describes as ‘an excessive sensitivity to intellectual status that leads to unwarranted conclusions of intellectual superiority and inferiority’. Crucially, however, being a snob is not just a matter of having an unwarranted preoccupation with status. The vice consists in having a preoccupation with considerations of intellectual status in a way that leads one to look down on others whom one views as inferior. Crerar concludes his discussion with the observation that the latter type of intellectual snobbery should be of special interest to epistemologists who are looking to move beyond a motivational account of intellectual vice. The volume closes with Part IV – applied vice epistemology. Applied vice epistemology. That term refers both to attempts to apply vice-epistemic insights to practical domains (like healthcare and education) and the reciprocal appeal

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to actual epistemic practice to inform thinking about epistemic vices. We think that looking for epistemic vice in practice is crucial: among other things, it can reveal new vices, articulate the different forms that vicious conduct can take, and provide effective ameliorative strategies. After all, we often tend to spot epistemic vices when they manifest within our epistemic practices, especially those practices that are integral to the organization and operation of our societies – the media, law, education, healthcare, and so on. Casey Johnson focuses on education, arguing that contemporary educational practices discourage the development of epistemic phronesis. This refers to a cultivated capacity to intelligently govern the application of one’s epistemic skills, abilities, and other attainments – something which Johnson argues is often thwarted by developments within education, such as the imperative to ‘teach to the test’ which was encouraged in the United States by the No Child Left Behind Act. Her analysis of epistemic corruption shows what vice epistemology can contribute to contemporary critical discourses of education, as well as deepening our understanding of a positive exemplar, the epistemic phronimos. Lani Watson explores the connections between vice epistemology and the practices of questioning that are central to our everyday, social, and political lives. She starts with an account of bad questioning, divided into failures to identify a proper content for one’s questions and failures to properly perform questions – for instance, by asking in ways that are aggressive, intrusive, or misleading. Watson organizes these into a sophisticated taxonomy of forms of bad questioning practice, which she then applies to a careful analysis of several recent, high-profile cases of public political discourses, including the Scottish independence and Brexit referenda in the United Kingdom. As those examples suggest, epistemic vicious conduct can often be of deep importance to the integrity and future of our social and political systems.

Open questions Unsurprisingly, there are many open questions in vice epistemology that warrant further exploration. Here, we mention just six sets of questions. First, there are issues in vice ontology. What are epistemic vices? Some candidates are character traits, attitudes, sensibilities, ways of thinking, emotions, and other aspects of our minds or characters. Some favor monistic answers, while others go pluralistic. As well as their intrinsic interest, these ontological questions also inform how we go about studying the epistemic vices – through conceptual analysis, say, or appeal to empirical psychology. They can also inform our ameliorative decisions, since what the vices are can inform our decisions about how best to transform them, if that is even a possibility. Vice ontology can also include vice taxonomy, the project of cogently ordering the vices of the mind. We can start by providing lists of those vices, for sure, but a list is only so useful. Second, there are issues concerning the classification of epistemic vices, which follows closely on the heels of vice ontology. How should we cogently organize

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 13 the vices of the mind? Are our current lists of those vices historically contingent? Are we ‘missing’ some epistemic vices from our lists? Have certain kinds or clusters of epistemic vices enjoyed attention, to the occlusion of others, as some historically minded philosophers argue (Manson 2012, Smith 2016)? If so, how can we spot those ‘missing’ vices? Can historical study of epistemic vices and failings of the kind in Kidd (2018b) help us identify them and describe the wider contets of thought which lent them salience? In pursuing these questions, we can turn to work by social and intellectual historians on virtues, vices, and character (see DeYoung 2009, Kivisto 2014, Paul and van Dongen 2017, Petkov 2012). Third, which structural conditions facilitate and amplify epistemic vices? Which structural conditions might ameliorate epistemic vices? What sorts of concepts do we need to theorize the dynamic relationships between character, structures, and virtue and vice? Will we need to give different answers, depending on the specific vice in question? Will some conditions facilitate some vices while ameliorating others? Will there be any common features of ameliorative structural conditions that could be employed across the varied domains of public discourse, online media consumption, education, and healthcare practice? Can epistemic vices be legitimately attributed to abstract objects, too, such as doctrines, stances, or policies? Relatedly, fourth, what are the features of group epistemic vice? Are there epistemic vices that can only be had by groups or collectives, and not by individuals? Are the strategies for ameliorating vices had by a group different from the strategies for ameliorating vices had by individuals? Does collective epistemic vice extend into institutional vices? How does thinking about epistemic vices in collective ways affect the methodology and agenda of vice epistemology – for instance, does it require us to embrace feminist frameworks attentive to power relations, social situation, and systems of oppression (Kidd 2020)? For these issues, vice epistemologists should take guidance from earlier work in feminist critical character theory and epistemology (see Daukas 2019, Dillon 2012). Fifth, which epistemic vices contribute to the pollution of our online environment, via the creation and dissemination of ‘fake news’? And, which epistemic vices do those polluted online environments, in turn, help to facilitate? Hot on the heels of contemporary ‘social virtue epistemology’, there’s surely scope for studies of the interrelations of vice epistemology and social epistemology – perhaps in the direction of an anti-social epistemology. Some topics of concern will be socially scaffolded processes of epistemic corruption, epistemic vices and the media, ameliorative projects aimed at the social-epistemic structures, and the development of effective methods for studying the social, political, and structural dimensions of epistemically vicious conduct. Sixth, how is vice epistemology connected to epistemic resistance and liberation? Do some traditional epistemic virtues, such as intellectual humility, inhibit epistemic resistance and liberation? If so, might intellectual arrogance count as a liberatory epistemic virtue? Can vice epistemology be a source of social and political activism?4 What are the connections between oppression, marginalization, and epistemic character?

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We hope this volume helps to inspire further work on epistemic vices and vice epistemology along the lines indicated by these sorts of questions. We also hope it inspires applications of the field to other areas, both in and outside of academic philosophy.

Notes 1 There is a small literature on Confucian character epistemology, although most of it focuses on the epistemic virtues, rather than the epistemic vices: see Kidd (2018a), Li (2016), and Tsai (2014). 2 Three exemplary Buddhist catalogues of our failings from the Pali Canon are the Sabbāsava Sutta in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, 3rd ed., translated by Bikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2009); the Udumbarika-Sihanāda Sutta in The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikāya, trans. by Maurice Walsh (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995); and Buddhaghosa’s Visuddmimagga (5th century bce), trans. by Bhikkhu Nyanamoli (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 2011). 3 At a panel on epistemic vice at the 2016 meeting of the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division, a delegate who missed the panel asked what it was about. Upon being told the topics included arrogance and dogmatism, they replied, ‘Oh, political epistemology, then’. 4 Within contemporary philosophy, these sorts of applied social and political issues tend to dominate, but, in other cultures and historical periods, the vices of the mind were worrisome for other reasons – as obstacles to our salvation, for instance.

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From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 15 Battaly, Heather. 2016. “Epistemic Virtue and Vice: Reliabilism, Responsibilism, and Personalism,” in Chienkuo Mi, Michael Slote, and Ernest Sosa (eds.), Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Western and Chinese Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 99–120. Battaly, Heather. 2017. “Testimonial Injustice, Epistemic Vice, and Vice Epistemology,” in Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice. New York: Routledge, 223–231. Battaly, Heather. 2018. “Closed-Mindedness and Dogmatism,” Episteme 15(3): 261–282. Battaly, Heather. 2019. “Vice Epistemology has a Responsibility Problem,” Philosophical Issues 29(1): 24–36. Biddle, Justin, Ian James Kidd, and Anna Leuschner. 2017. “Epistemic Corruption and Manufactured Doubt: The Case of Climate Science,” Public Affairs Quarterly 31(3): 165–187. Bloomfield, Paul. 2019. “Epistemic Intemperance,” American Philosophical Quarterly 56(2): 109–124. Carel, Havi and Ian James Kidd. 2014. “Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare: A Philosophical Analysis,” Medicine, Healthcare, and Philosophy 17(4): 529–40. Cassam, Quassim. 2016. “Vice Epistemology,” The Monist 99(3): 159–180. Cassam, Quassim. 2017. “Vice Ontology,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6(11): 20–27. Cassam, Quassim. 2019a. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cassam, Quassim. 2019b. Conspiracy Theories. Cambridge: Polity. Code, Lorraine. 1987. Epistemic Responsibility. Hanover, NE: University Press of New England. Confucius (Kǒngzı̌ ). 2003. Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Crerar, Charlie. 2018. “Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96(4): 753–766. Daukas, Nancy. 2019. “Feminist Virtue Epistemology,” in Heather Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. New York: Routledge, 379–391. Desmond, William. 2014. Cynics. London: Routledge. DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. 2009. Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Dillon, Robin. 2012. “Critical Character Theory: Toward a Feminist Perspective on ‘Vice’ (and ‘Virtue’),” in Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson (eds.), Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 83–114. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2010. “Can There Be Institutional Virtues?,” in Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 235–52. Fricker, Miranda. 2016. “Fault and No-Fault Responsibility for Implicit Prejudice,” in Michael Brady and Miranda Fricker (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 33–50. Hannon, Michael and Jeroen de Ridder (eds.). 2020. The Routledge Handbook to Political Epistemology. New York: Routledge.

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Holroyd, Jules and Daniel Kelly. 2016. “Implicit Bias, Character, and Control,” in Alberto Masala and Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 106–133. Holroyd, Jules. 2017. “Responsibility for Implicit Bias,” Philosophy Compass 12(3). doi:10.1111/phc3.12410 Keown, Damien. 1991. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. London: Macmillan. Kidd, Ian James. 2016. “Charging Others with Epistemic Vice,” The Monist 99(3): 181–197. Kidd, Ian James. 2017. “Epistemic Vices in Public Debate: The Case of ‘New Atheism’,” in Christopher Cotter and Philip Quadrio (eds.), New Atheism’s Legacy: Critical Perspectives from Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 51–68. Kidd, Ian James. 2018a. “Confucianism, Curiosity, and Moral Self-Cultivation,” in Ilhan Inan, Lani Watson, Dennis Whitcomb, and Safiye Yigit (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Curiosity. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 97–116. Kidd, Ian James. 2018b. “Deep Epistemic Vices,” Journal of Philosophical Research 43: 43–67. Kidd, Ian James. 2018c. “Is Scientism Epistemically Vicious?” in Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels, and Rene van Woudenberg (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 222–249. Kidd, Ian James. 2019. “Epistemic Corruption and Education,” Episteme 16(2): 220–235. Kidd, Ian James. 2020. “Epistemic Vices and Feminist Philosophies of Science,” in Kristen Intemann and Sharon Crasnow (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Feminist Philosophy of Science. New York: Routledge. Kidd, Ian James, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (eds.). 2017. The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice. New York: Routledge. Kivisto, Sari. 2014. The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge in Early Modern Universities. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Kotzee, Ben (ed.). 2013. Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lahroodi, Reza. 2019. “Virtue Epistemology and Collective Epistemology,” in Heather Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. New York: Routledge, 407–419. Li, Jin. 2016. “Humility in Learning: A Confucian Perspective,” Journal of Moral Education 45(2): 147–165. Locke, John. 1996. Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding [1706], eds., Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Locke, John. 2008. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690], ed. Pauline Phemister. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, Michael P. 2019. Know-It-All Society. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Manson, Neil C. 2012. “Epistemic Restraint and the Vice of Curiosity,” Philosophy 87: 239–259. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montmarquet, James. 1987. “Epistemic Virtue,” Mind 96: 482–497. Nguyen, C. Thi. 2018. “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles,” Episteme. doi:10.1017/ epi.2018.32 Nyanatiloka. 2004. Buddhist Dictionary: Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, ed. Nyanaponika. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.

From epistemic vices to vice epistemology 17 Pascal, Blaise. 1980. Pensées [1670], trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin. Paul, Herman and Jeroen van Dongen (eds.). 2017. Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Petkov, Kiril. 2012. “The Cultural Career of a ‘Minor’ Vice: Arrogance in the Medieval Treatise on Sin,” in Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard (eds.), Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins. York: York Medieval Press, 43–84. Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile. 2012. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance,” Hypatia 27(4): 715–735. Roberts, Robert C. and W. Jay Wood. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Robert C. and W. Jay Wood. 2019. “Understanding, Humility, and the Vices of Pride,” in Heather Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. New York: Routledge, 363–375. Sherman, Benjamin R. and Stacey Goguen (eds.). 2019. Overcoming Epistemic Injustice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Smith, Richard. 2016. “The Virtues of Unknowing,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 50(2): 272–284. Sosa, Ernest. 1980. “The Raft and the Pyramid,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5(1): 3–26. Swank, Casey. 2000. “Epistemic Vice,” in Guy Axtell (ed.), Knowledge, Belief, and Character: Readings in Virtue Epistemology, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 195–204. Tanesini, Alessandra. 2016. ““Calm Down Dear”: Intellectual Arrogance, Silencing and Ignorance,” Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume 90(1): 71–92. Tanesini, Alessandra. 2018a. “Intellectual Servility and Timidity,” Journal of Philosophical Research 43: 21–41. Tanesini, Alessandra. 2018b. “Epistemic Vice and Motivation,” Metaphilosophy 49(3): 350–367. Tsai, Cheng-Hung. 2014. “Xunzi and Virtue Epistemology,” Universitas 41(3): 121–142. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1995. A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints [1792], ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zagzebski, Linda. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I

Foundational issues

1

The structure of intellectual vices Jason Baehr

Much of virtue epistemology turns on an insight concerning the relationship between intellectual character and epistemic achievement. The insight is that many prized epistemic accomplishments are underwritten by the intellectual character strengths of the persons who make them. Ground-breaking scientific discoveries, brilliant philosophical treatises, and illuminating histories frequently manifest the curiosity, intellectual autonomy, intellectual humility, and related attributes of their authors. These qualities are intellectual virtues; they are excellences of intellectual character. Intellectual vices, on the other hand, are defects of intellectual character, such as intellectual laziness, intellectual cowardice, narrow-mindedness, closed-mindedness, and dogmatism. My focus in this chapter is on the structure of intellectual vices. In particular, I am interested in whether the structure of intellectual vices mirrors that of intellectual virtues. As such, this chapter is intended as a contribution to what might be called “foundational vice epistemology.”1 In the first section, I provide an overview of the structure of intellectual virtues. Next, I consider whether intellectual vices exhibit a symmetrical structure. This consideration leads, in the final section of the chapter, to an assessment of “motivationalism” concerning intellectual vice.

1.1 The structure of intellectual virtues I begin with some general features of intellectual virtues as I understand them. First, intellectual virtues are strengths of intellectual character. In Aristotelian terms, they are dispositions to act, think, and feel in particular (rational or excellent) ways. Like Aristotle’s moral virtues, they also occupy a midpoint between two (or more) extremes. Intellectual humility, for instance, can be understood as a mean between intellectual arrogance (deficiency) and intellectual self-deprecation (excess). Open-mindedness is a mean between closed-mindedness (deficiency) and gullibility (excess). And intellectual courage is a mean between intellectual cowardice (deficiency) and intellectual recklessness (excess). Second, intellectual virtues can be differentiated from (familiar or straightforwardly) moral virtues on the basis of their ultimate aim or object, which is distinctively epistemic. Intellectual virtues flow from something like a “love” or

22 Jason Baehr intrinsic concern for epistemic goods, such as truth, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. They are, as James Montmarquet notes, the character traits that a “truth-desiring person would want to have” (1993: 30). Third, intellectual virtues contribute to their possessor’s “personal worth.” This does not mean that intellectually virtuous persons are “worth more” or possess a greater inherent dignity than persons who lack intellectual virtues. Rather, the idea is that intellectual virtues make us excellent or admirable as persons. There is no contradiction in thinking, as many do, that while all persons share a common worth or value qua persons, some are better persons or better qua persons than others. My notion of personal worth corresponds to the latter but not the former type of value. The fact that intellectual virtues contribute to their possessor’s personal worth is explainable (at least partly) in terms of their motivational basis. That is, a “love” of or intrinsic concern with epistemic goods is personally admirable or excellent; it reflects well on its possessor qua person.2 In previous work (2015), I have defended a “four-dimensional” account of the structure of intellectual virtues, according to which each intellectual virtue has a competence dimension, a motivational dimension, a judgment dimension, and an affective dimension. These dimensions are not necessarily discrete parts or components of an intellectual virtue. The model is consistent with the possibility that, say, two dimensions of an intellectual virtue might have their basis in a single constitutive part. Nevertheless, as I hope to demonstrate, it remains theoretically useful to distinguish between all four dimensions. 1.1.1 Competence dimension I turn now to a brief overview of this model. First, for every intellectual virtue V, there is a skill, activity, or competence characteristic of V on the basis of which V can be distinguished from other intellectual virtues. To possess an intellectual virtue—open-mindedness, say—is to be skilled or competent at a certain sort of intellectual activity, for example, at perspective-switching. Similarly, curiosity involves competence at asking thoughtful and insightful questions. And intellectual humility involves the skill of attending to and owning one’s intellectual limitations. Moreover, it is on the basis of these characteristic competences or skills that we are able to distinguish one intellectual virtue from another. While all intellectual virtues have a common motivational basis (a “love” of epistemic goods), they differ one from another in respect of their characteristic competences or skills. 1.1.2 Motivational dimension However, being skilled at perspective-switching is not sufficient for possessing the virtue of open-mindedness. Nor is being competent at formulating thoughtful and insightful questions sufficient for the virtue of curiosity. For one can possess such skills but be unmotivated to use them, and thereby fail to possess the virtues in question. Accordingly, to possess an intellectual virtue V, one must be

The structure of intellectual vices 23 motivated to engage in the activity, deploy the skill, or manifest the competence proper to V—and be motivated to do so (at least partly) out of an intrinsic concern for or “love” of epistemic goods. This requirement is consistent, of course, with the possibility—indeed the reality—that intellectually virtuous persons often care about or pursue knowledge partly for instrumental reasons. 1.1.3 Judgment dimension This might appear to be a more or less complete picture. If a person is capable of perspective-switching, and motivated to perspective-switch, what could prevent him from possessing the virtue of open-mindedness? A possible reply is that he might lack good judgment about when or for how long or in what way to perspective-switch. As such, he might regularly fail to hit the “mean” with respect to perspective-switching. Therefore, to possess an intellectual virtue V, one must have good judgment with respect to when, how often, in what amount, toward whom, and so on, to manifest the competence proper to V. Put another way, every intellectual virtue contains an element of phronesis or practical wisdom. 1.1.4   Affective dimension A further dimension of intellectual virtues also merits attention. We can come at it by considering Aristotle’s notion of enkrateia or continence (NE.VII). For Aristotle, the continent agent is one who reliably acts virtuously, and does so out of sound ethical judgment, but who fails to enjoy or take appropriate pleasure in so acting. On his view, continent persons fall short of moral virtue. My view of intellectual virtues stands in partial contrast to Aristotle’s view of moral virtues. I am inclined to think that a robustly enkratic person can be minimally intellectually virtuous, particularly if the person satisfies the motivational requirement on intellectual virtue. An inquirer with an unstinting commitment to truth, who reliably and intelligently manifests virtuous intellectual competences, but takes no pleasure in doing so, seems to me to exhibit personal excellence sufficient for minimal virtue. That said, I also find plausible Aristotle’s claim that pleasure “completes [virtuous] activity … as a sort of supervenient end” (NE, 1175a). Put another way, I think pleasure and other appropriate affections are necessary for the possession of full virtue. More precisely, I maintain that to possess an intellectual virtue V in its fullness, one must be disposed to manifest the affective or feeling states proper to V. This entails neither that a fully virtuous person always enjoys manifesting her virtuerelevant competence, nor that the relevant affective or feeling states are limited to pleasure, delight, etc. The intellectually courageous person who puts herself in harm’s way in order to discover or communicate the truth may rarely (if ever) enjoy doing so. Instead, her virtue is more likely to be manifested in feelings of confidence or self-control.3 A final observation about these dimensions is that they can be instantiated to a greater or lesser degree. A person can be more or less competent at

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perspective-switching, have better or worse judgment about when to perspectiveswitch, or enjoy perspective-switching to a greater or lesser extent. Accordingly, intellectual virtue possession is itself a matter of degree: once a certain threshold is met, minimal virtue is attained; however, for any intellectual virtue, there may be a significant developmental or normative distance between a minimal possession of the virtue and its full or maximal possession. To summarize the discussion up to this point: intellectual virtues (1) are strengths of intellectual character that (2) contribute to personal worth, (3) are rooted in a concern with or “love” of epistemic goods, (4) have at least four dimensions, and (5) are possessed in degrees.

1.2 The structure of intellectual vices Suppose the structure of intellectual virtues is more or less as described. And suppose we are also interested in understanding the structure of intellectual vices. Several questions come to mind, including: do intellectual vices exhibit an analogous four-part structure? More precisely, to possess an intellectual vice, must one be defective along all four dimensions of an intellectual virtue? Or might it be sufficient that one is defective along just one (or two or three) of these dimensions?4 I begin with three brief points about intellectual vices as I understand them. First, like intellectual virtues, they are attributes of intellectual character; more specifically, and by contrast with intellectual virtues, they are defects of intellectual character. Second, like intellectual virtues, they can be possessed to a greater or lesser extent. Third, intellectual vices make a negative contribution to personal worth. They reflect negatively on their possessor qua person. Let us begin with the following conjecture: one possesses an intellectual vice only if one is defective with respect to all four dimensions of one or more intellectual virtues. On this view, the structure of intellectual vices mirrors that of intellectual virtues. To possess an intellectual vice, one must exhibit defective competence, motivation, judgment, and affection.5 In contrast with this claim, recall Aristotle’s remark that while “it is possible to fail in many ways … to succeed is possible only in one way … For men are good in but one way, but bad in many” (NE, II.6). This suggests that our conjecture may be too strong—that while several things must go right for the development of an intellectual virtue, relatively few things need to go wrong for the possession of an intellectual vice. Indeed, I think something like Aristotle’s view is applicable to intellectual virtues and vices. 1.2.1 Defective motivation To make good on this claim, I begin by noting that defective intellectual motivation can be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice. Imagine a person who possesses a wide range of virtue-relevant competences and a reasonably good sense of when (etc.) these competences should be manifested, but who is indifferent to truth or knowledge, and therefore systematically refrains from thinking or

The structure of intellectual vices 25 inquiring in intellectually virtuous ways.6 Such a person might be intellectually lazy, and his laziness might be an intellectual vice. A similar point holds for intellectual carelessness. I might be aware of what would be required for giving an accurate characterization of a complex philosophical position, and have the ability to make such a characterization, but out of carelessness fail to do so. If I do this often enough or across a wide enough range of contexts, I might possess the vice of intellectual carelessness.7 Here a deficiency of virtuous epistemic motivation appears to be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice.8 Consider, in addition, the vice of epistemic malevolence, which I elsewhere describe as opposition to the epistemic good (or to epistemic goods) as such (2010: 204). Here as well someone might be capable of listening and responding to his interlocutors in open-minded and intellectually generous ways, and have a good sense of when (etc.) to do so, yet systematically refrain from manifesting these abilities on account of his malevolence. In this case, a positively bad epistemic motivation would be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice.9 A variation on this case is worth considering. Imagine an epistemically malevolent agent who is skilled at open-minded and empathic thinking and who connivingly deploys these skills in an effort to sow cognitive dissonance and ignorance among his interlocutors. On my view, if open-minded and empathic thinking are sufficiently ingrained in the person’s way of thinking and reasoning, it might be accurate to say that he has the traits or attributes of open-mindedness and intellectual empathy. Intuitively, however, these traits would not be intellectual virtues in the present sense. Indeed, they would appear to be vices, making their possessor a worse person or worse qua person. The explanation for this, again, consists in the agent’s epistemically malevolent motivation. This leads to the surprising (but I think ultimately correct) view that the sorts of traits we often think of as intellectual virtues (e.g. open-mindedness and cognitive empathy) can, on motivational grounds, turn out to be intellectual vices.10 I note two findings from the discussion thus far: Finding #1: defective epistemic motivation (whether positive or negative) can be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice.11 Finding #2: if ill-motivated, traits we tend to think of as intellectual virtues can be intellectual vices. 1.2.2 Defective judgment Can defective practical judgment also be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice? There is at least some reason to think it can. Recall the possibility, noted in the previous section, that a person might be skilled at perspective-switching, and be motivated to use this skill, but have poor judgment about when, how often, toward whom, etc., she should do so. Such a person might, as a result of her lack of judgment, end up being either closed-minded (if her judgment is too restrictive) or gullible (if her judgment is too permissive). Similarly, a person might be skilled

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at and motivated to resist her fearful impulses in an epistemic context while being indiscriminate about when or how often she should manifest this skill. As a consequence, she might become intellectually reckless or foolhardy. However, it is important to ask whether the kind of closedmindedness, gullibility, and intellectual recklessness just alluded to necessarily would be genuine intellectual vices. Whether they would be vices depends, it seems, on whether the person in question can (in some sense) be considered responsible for or in relation to her lack of virtuous judgment. Suppose, for instance, that her lack of judgment is a function of her (entirely inculpable) unfamiliarity with features of her epistemic environment, such that she lacks an accurate sense of when perspective-switching is (or isn’t) likely to be epistemically appropriate. Or suppose her lack of judgment is due to an innate and intractable (and therefore inculpable) cognitive disability. In cases like this, the attributes in question would not reflect negatively on their possessor qua person; as such, they would not count as intellectual vices, on the present view.12 Later in the chapter we will consider some possible implications of this point for our understanding of the relationship between the judgment and motivational aspects of intellectual vice. In the meantime, we may draw the following, fairly modest conclusion concerning defective judgment and intellectual vice: Finding #3: defective judgment can be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice only if the person in question is (in some sense) responsible for this defect. Though relatively modest, this finding raises the thorny question of exactly what sense or type of responsibility is required in order for a defect to count as an intellectual vice. Some argue that for a feature of an agent to contribute to his possession of an intellectual virtue or vice, the agent himself must be responsible for this feature in the sense of having cultivated or brought it about (Zagzebski 1996: 104–105, 116–125). I cannot address this or similar claims within the limits of this chapter. Instead, I will simply register that such a view strikes me as objectionably narrow. I heartily endorse Heather Battaly’s recent recommendation that vice epistemologists pay closer attention to “non-voluntarist” accounts of moral responsibility (2019: 9–10).13 In keeping with this, I suggest that when it comes to thinking about ways in which defective judgment might contribute to intellectual vice, we would do well to opt for a wide rather than a narrow concept of responsibility. 1.2.3 Defective competence What, then, about the competence dimension of an intellectual vice? Can a person possess an intellectual vice strictly on account of lacking the skill or competence proper to one or more intellectual virtues? To answer this question, we need to try to imagine a case in which a person lacks the competence proper to a given virtue despite being motivated to manifest this competence and having good judgment

The structure of intellectual vices 27 about when (etc.) to do so. There is, it seems, a psychological implausibility about such a scenario. If a person is genuinely motivated, say, to pay careful attention to important details, or to avoid careless mistakes, and if this person has good judgment about when (etc.) to do these things, why wouldn’t he also be competent to do them? What might explain his incompetence, if not defective motivation or judgment? This underscores a notable feature of the competences proper to intellectual virtues: namely, that they are not, at least in some of their most basic forms, particularly technically demanding.14 As a general rule, if a person really wants to pay attention to important details, avoid careless mistakes, or acknowledge her intellectual limitations, she is able to do so. In this respect, virtue-specific competences differ from many other cognitive competences or skills, the cultivation of which can take a great deal of practice and training. That said, I think we can successfully identify cases in which a person is genuinely motivated to manifest a virtue-relevant competence, has a good sense of when (etc.) to manifest this competence, but is incapable of doing so. Here too a natural cognitive disability might prevent someone from, say, attending to or focusing on important details, even if the person is robustly motivated to do otherwise. Or, consider the sort of competence characteristic of intellectual autonomy, which involves thinking for oneself, drawing one’s own conclusions, and so on. A person who has been brainwashed, or who has been raised in an extremely epistemically deferential environment, might see the value of thinking in intellectually autonomous ways, desire very much to think in these ways, have a good sense of when (etc.) to do so, but still find himself without the skill or ability to think for himself. Note, however, that in the sorts of scenarios just described, the persons in question are unlikely to merit a charge of intellectual vice. Their epistemic defects are unlikely to reflect negatively on them qua persons.15 And the reason, it seems, is that they would not appear to be responsible (even in a wide sense) for their lack of virtuous competence. Might there, then, be other cases in which a person satisfies the motivational and judgment conditions for a particular virtue but still fails (culpably) to satisfy the competence condition and consequently possesses an intellectual vice? This is a tricky issue, and one to which we will return below. Presently, we may draw a conclusion regarding competence and intellectual vice that parallels the conclusion regarding good judgment: Finding #4: a lack of virtue-relevant competence can be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice only if the person in question is (in a broad sense) responsible for this defect.16 Before turning to the affective dimension, I want to consider a further point related to competence and intellectual vice. We have been considering whether a failure to possess a virtue-relevant competence might be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice. We have yet to consider whether intellectual vices might involve competences of their own.

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We have already found that it is not a necessary feature of intellectual vices that each vice have a unique or characteristic competence. For, again, a mere lack of virtue-relevant skill can be sufficient for the possession of a vice, provided that the person is (broadly) responsible for this deficiency. Nevertheless, it would appear that at least some vices are such that, to possess them (or to possess them fully), one must possess certain skills characteristic of these vices. This includes skills associated with self-deception, keeping counter-evidence at bay (intellectual dishonesty), misrepresenting opposing viewpoints (closed-mindedness), and the like. Plausibly, with the right sort of practice or training, one can become “better”—more competent at—these mental operations. Moreover, such competences are expressive of the vices in question. A closed-minded person who is especially skilled at misrepresenting to herself the content or plausibility of other people’s views is more closed-minded than a closed-minded person who is still in the process of acquiring this skill. This leads to a further conclusion concerning competence and intellectual vice: Finding #5: there are intellectual vices such that, to possess them fully or maximally, one must possess certain skills or competences proper to these vices. 1.2.4   Defective affection On, then, to the affective dimension of intellectual virtues. Can one’s failure to manifest the affections proper to an intellectual virtue be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice? Here there would appear to be an asymmetry with the dimensions considered above. Consider again Aristotle’s enkratic or “continent” agent. According to Aristotle, while this person is not virtuous, neither is he vicious. A similar point holds, I would suggest, with respect to epistemic continence. A person who, say, reliably probes for deeper understanding (thoroughness), but who never enjoys the activity of thorough inquiry, while less than fully virtuous in respect of his thoroughness, surely is not intellectually vicious. Similarly, someone who reliably asks thoughtful and insightful questions, but takes no delight in such wonderment, while less than fully virtuously inquisitive, does not, as such, manifest an intellectual vice. It remains, however, that certain characteristically vicious affections can compound or amplify the badness of one’s vices. For instance, a person who enjoys his chronic intellectual laziness or sloppiness, delights in cognitive distortion or obfuscation, or takes pleasure in concealing his intellectual mistakes or misrepresenting others’ views, would be more vicious than one who performs the same intellectual actions but derives no pleasure from them. We may, then, draw the following conclusions concerning affections and intellectual vices: Finding #6: a deficiency in virtuous affections is not, by itself, sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice.

The structure of intellectual vices 29 Finding #7: vicious affections are necessary for the full or maximal possession of at least some intellectual vices.

1.3 Motivationalism We have found that the structure of intellectual vices is not symmetrical with that of intellectual virtues in the sense that, to possess an intellectual vice, a person need not be defective across all four dimensions of an intellectual virtue. In the present section, I consider the implications of our findings for “motivationalism” about intellectual virtue, which I here take to be the thesis that defective intellectual motivation is a necessary condition for the possession of an intellectual vice.17 On the one hand, we have found that the most obvious or straightforward way a person can be intellectually vicious is motivational in nature: viz. by failing to care sufficiently about epistemic goods (e.g. intellectual laziness or carelessness) or by being outright opposed to them (e.g. epistemic malevolence). While this might appear to tell in favor of motivationalism, we have also encountered some evidence for thinking that a lack of virtuous competence or judgment can be sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice (provided that the person is broadly responsible for this defect). 1.3.1 Motivation and responsibility To better understand whether the proposed model of intellectual vice is compatible with motivationalism, we must return to the relevant notion of responsibility. Specifically, we must consider: on account of what might a person be (relevantly, broadly) responsible for his lack or virtuous judgment or competence? One salient possibility underscores a potential connection between responsibility and motivation. Imagine someone whose gullibility is a function of her culpable lack of good judgment about when (etc.) it is appropriate to perspective-switch. Again, what might explain this lack of good judgment? One obvious possibility is that the person has not cared much or has been insufficiently concerned with developing an accurate sense of when her tendency to perspective-switch might lead her astray. Here, the person’s lack of good judgment clearly has a motivational source (it is rooted in her lack of care or concern). If this is how we should think about vice-constituting defective judgment across the board, then the account of intellectual vice sketched above may be consistent with motivationalism.18 For again, the suggested picture is that the kind of defective judgment that can contribute to intellectual vice necessarily has a motivational basis. Consider as well a scenario involving a (culpable) lack of virtuous competence. Imagine a person who is motivated to think for himself, has a reasonably good sense of when he should do so, but has yet to develop this ability. Suppose, further, that he really ought to have developed the ability to think for himself at this point—that his failure to have done so is not a function of cognitive disability, insufficient opportunities to practice thinking for himself, or the like. What might

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explain this failure? Here as well it is tempting to think in motivational terms, for example, in terms of an insufficient interest in or concern with learning to think for himself or with the epistemic goods such thinking can deliver. These cases suggest a potential problem with our earlier attempts (in connection with findings #3 and #4) to imagine a person who is motivated to manifest a virtue-relevant competence out of an intrinsic concern for epistemic goods, yet fails to possess either the competence itself or good judgment about when (etc.) the competence should be manifested. While these initially seemed like genuine possibilities, we now have some reason to doubt that they are. Specifically, the cases just considered underscore the possibility that any (culpable, vice-constituting) failure to possess the competence or judgment proper to a virtue will entail a prior failure of virtuous motivation.19 If this were right, then motivationalism about intellectual vice apparently would be in the clear, for it would turn out that a (culpable) deficiency of virtuous competence or judgment is sufficient for intellectual vice only given a corresponding motivational failure.20 But is it right to think that a (culpable) failure of virtuous competence or judgment entails a failure of virtuous epistemic motivation? I am uncertain about this. It depends, at a minimum, on how exactly we understand the motivational dimension of intellectual virtues. This dimension was characterized above as follows: to possess an intellectual virtue V, one must be motivated to engage in the activity, deploy the skill, or manifest the competence proper to V—and to do so (at least partly) out of an intrinsic concern for or “love” of worthy epistemic ends. Understood in this way, it seems doubtful that instantiating the motivational dimension of an intellectual virtue precludes a prior culpable failure to instantiate at least the judgment dimension of that virtue.21 To see why, consider again someone who satisfies the motivational condition with respect to the competence of perspective-switching. Ex hypothesi this person is motivated to perspective-switch and her motivation is rooted at least partly in an intrinsic concern with epistemic goods. Why should this particular state rule out the possibility that, as a result of a kind of inattentiveness or intellectual laziness, the person might (culpably) have failed to develop an accurate sense of when her disposition to perspective-switch is likely to lead her astray? Why must a sincere and robust motivation to take up alternative perspectives, even when rooted in an intrinsic concern with epistemic goods, rule out this other sort of motivational deficiency (viz. a deficiency that could explain the person’s lack of good judgment about her disposition)?22 I see no reason to think that it must. However, to my mind, this does not settle the question of whether motivationalism is correct about intellectual vice. Rather, I think the more salient question is whether the foregoing characterization of the motivational dimension is too narrow. Again, if a person fails, as a result of inattentiveness or intellectual laziness, to develop good judgment concerning when a virtue-relevant competence might lead her away from the truth, there is a clear sense in which the person is insufficiently concerned with or motivated by truth. In Robert Adams’s (2006) terms, it suggests that the person is not sufficiently “for” epistemic goods.

The structure of intellectual vices 31 This underscores the need for a broader characterization of the motivational dimension of virtue. It also underscores the possibility that motivationalism might still be correct about intellectual vice. For, again, it suggests that a motivational deficiency underlies the sorts of failures in judgment and competence which in turn contribute to the possession of an intellectual vice. A full defense of this claim would require further reflection on the question of whether it is possible to possess a culpable or vice-constituting defect of judgment or competence that is not rooted in a defect of epistemic motivation. That is, what alternative explanation might there be of why a person possesses a genuinely vicious defect of judgment or competence? It is not immediately clear what such an alternative explanation might be. However, the question merits more attention than I am able to give it here. 1.2.3 Purported counterexamples to motivationalism In the remainder of the chapter, I want to look briefly at five cases that have been raised in the literature against motivationalist accounts of intellectual vice and to sketch some initial reasons for thinking that none presents a very clear or intractable problem for these accounts.23 The first is the character of Oblomov, from the Ivan Goncharov novel of the same name, as discussed by Charlie Crerar (2018: 757f). As Crerar describes him, Oblomov is “a parody of a lazy young nobleman, who is almost totally incapable of making any decisions or undertaking any actions.” He is, Crerar says, “a limit case for laziness and incuriosity … that reflect badly upon him, and for which he seems blameworthy.” Yet, his vices “are motivated, not by an active desire to avoid knowledge or to remain ignorant, but by an utter indifference to the two” (757). I have no objection to this assessment. While it may present a problem for versions of motivationalism according to which the possession of an intellectual vice requires the possession of positively bad epistemic motives, I agree with Crerar that such views are too restrictive.24 Again, on the view put forth here, a person can possess an epistemic vice on account of being positively against epistemic goods (epistemic malevolence) or by being insufficiently for them (intellectual laziness and carelessness). The second case is that of Galileo. Drawing on a characterization from Bob Roberts and Jay Wood (2007: 254), Crerar describes Galileo as being “ultimately motivated by epistemic goods” but also an “arrogant genius.” Galileo’s sense of “his own intellectual superiority” leads to his being “closed-minded in his interactions with others” (2018: 750). Crerar seems not to take seriously enough the possibility that Galileo might be virtuous in certain respects but vicious in others, that is, that he might be virtuous in respect of his desire for truth, but vicious in respect of his intellectual arrogance. The critical question is how to understand Galileo’s arrogance and closed-mindedness, which are manifested in his judgment that he has nothing to learn from his interlocutors. Ex hypothesi Galileo’s reasoning is irrational and unreasonable.25 On account of what, then, might his sense of his

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own intellectual superiority lead him, mistakenly and irrationally, to ignore or minimize the potential epistemic contributions of others? One natural possibility is that his abilities and prior intellectual achievements have gone to his head, such that he has become less thoughtful about or attentive to his intellectual limitations or to how he might learn from others. As this possibility illustrates, it is not at all difficult to imagine that Galileo’s poor judgment might have a motivational basis. And if it does have such a basis, then the defender of motivationalism can agree that Galileo is vicious in respect of his arrogance and closedmindedness (while also acknowledging that he is, perhaps, virtuous to the extent that he continues to desire the truth). A similar response applies to a third case discussed by Crerar (2018: 759–760). Dave is a politician whose extremely privileged upbringing has “bestowed upon him a flawed understanding of what constitutes an intelligent and reliable person” (759). As a result, he believes that the “only people worth listening to” are people with backgrounds like his own. Once elected to office, Dave surrounds himself with and listens exclusively to the perspectives of people who satisfy his elitist criteria. He is “closed-minded … prejudiced, partial, and a snob” (760). Yet, says Crerar, he is also well-motivated on account of his desire to ascertain the truth about the likely outcomes of his political decisions (760). This good motivation notwithstanding, Dave’s thinking continues to manifest closed-mindedness, prejudice, partiality, and snobbery.26 If so, I think we can be confident that Dave ought to have known better than to categorically dismiss the potential epistemic contributions of anyone other than himself and his elite associates.27 And here again it seems plausible to think of this shortcoming in motivational terms. Had Dave been more conscientious in his reasoning, had he cared more about making accurate judgments concerning whose perspectives might have genuine merit, he would not have exemplified intellectual vice. A fourth case is discussed by Alessandra Tanesini (2018: 356).28 It features Olivia, a conspiracy theorist who “seems to be motivated by the truth and yet is intellectually vicious.” On the one hand, Olivia “does not want to believe conspiracies come what may; she only wants to believe them if they are true.” However, she “also wants the conspiracies to be true, and it is this motivation that guides her inquiries.” As a result, “she has a blind spot; she is closed-minded about the falsity of her pet theories” (356). As with Galileo and Dave, Olivia apparently has mixed epistemic motives. While caring about truth in certain respects, or to a certain extent, the fact that she “wants the conspiracies to be true” and that this desire “guides her inquiries” makes clear that Olivia is motivationally deficient. Accordingly, this case also appears to be consistent with the core of motivationalism.29 A fifth and final case comes from Tanesini (2018) via James Montmarquet (1993: 25). Gail is concerned, with good reason apparently, that she is too gullible. Out of “a desire for what is intellectually good,” she attempts to correct this defect by being less open to the views of others. Over time, she develops “a tendency not to listen to contrary views” and “thus turns herself into a dogmatic person” (356). This case can be handled in either of a couple of ways. If, for the

The structure of intellectual vices 33 duration of the time in question, Gail does her level best to compensate for her natural gullibility, then while she likely will not exhibit a defective motivation, neither will her “dogmatism” (if in fact it can be described as such) be a genuine intellectual vice. Tanesini makes a similar assessment, commenting: “If we were to ask [Gail] why she behaves as she does, she would make reference to her gullible temperament, which requires her to be particularly active in counterbalancing this tendency” (261). On the other hand, if Gail’s counterbalancing begins in this sensible and well-motivated way, but over time morphs into unthinking dismissiveness and dogmatism, then while Gail might eventually be intellectually vicious, it will, at this later point, be questionable whether her counterbalancing is well-motivated, that is, whether it is really driven any longer by an earnest attempt to improve the accuracy of her beliefs. Either way, the case appears not to pose a serious problem for motivationalism.

1.4 Conclusion We began by asking whether the structure of intellectual vices is symmetrical with that of intellectual virtues. In response, we quickly encountered an asymmetry. Minimally, a person need not be defective along the judgment or competence dimensions of an intellectual virtue in order to possess an intellectual vice. Defective epistemic motivation can, by itself, form the basis of an intellectual vice. We also considered some initial evidence for thinking that both defective judgment and defective competence can form the basis of an intellectual vice. On closer inspection, however, we were led to the possibility that any vice-making failures of judgment or competence might presuppose a motivational failure. Given certain connections between vice, motivation, and responsibility, we concluded that before trying to settle this issue, vice epistemologists would do well to consult the literature in moral psychology on “non-voluntarist” accounts of responsibility. These points also led to a consideration of “motivationalism” about intellectual vice. Here we found that while several recent objections to motivationalism appear to come up short, an adequate defense of this view requires closer attention to the exact nature and scope of the motivational dimension of intellectual virtues.30

Notes 1 This label is drawn from Ian James Kidd’s division of the field (2017: 1). For a recent substantial overview and contribution to this vice epistemology, see Cassam (2019). 2 It does not necessarily follow that intellectual virtues are moral virtues, at least in any narrow sense of “moral.” For it may be that personal worth or excellence has both moral and intellectual dimensions. For more on these points, see my (2011: Ch. 6) and Adams (2006). 3 Aristotle makes a similar point about courage (simpliciter) in NE.III.6. 4 By “sufficient” here my concern is with the possibility that a person might possess a vice strictly on account of being defective along (say) just a single dimension of a given virtue, that is, while possessing the features proper to the virtue’s other dimensions.

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5 Per note 4, by “exhibit defective competence, motivation, judgment, and affection,” I mean fail to possess virtuous competence, motivation, judgment, and affection. 6 As I do with this imagined (extremely sketchy) scenario, I will mostly be bracketing a concern with the affective dimension in my discussion of the remaining three dimensions. I do this merely to minimize the complexity of the examples. 7 I say “might” here and in the preceding sentence in light of the fact that the defective motivation might need to satisfy other conditions—e.g. it might need to be something that the person in question is (broadly) responsible for. More on this point below. 8 Though I will not pause to explore this point here, epistemic motivation can also be defective on account of being excessive. For example, an excessive concern for accuracy or for certainty (both epistemic goods) might lead to a kind of hyper-carefulness or epistemic scrupulosity. As this point suggests, I am not here purporting to identify the full range of ways in which defective motivation can contribute to intellectual vice. Thanks to Josh Dolin for raising this issue with me. 9 Per note 4 above, it would be sufficient in the sense that he need not (and indeed does not) lack the corresponding virtuous competence or judgment. Nevertheless, might it be necessary that he possess certain malevolence-specific competences? I will have more to say about vice-specific competences momentarily. However, while I cannot do justice to this issue here, my own sense is that such competences are not required for the minimal possession of epistemic malevolence (though they likely are required for its full possession). 10 For a helpful development of this point, see (Battaly 2018). 11 Note that I am not claiming that defective epistemic motivation is categorically or always sufficient for the possession of an intellectual vice—only that it can be. And, again, by “sufficient” I mean that a person with defective epistemic motivation can be vicious even if he doesn’t lack—that is, even if he possesses—the corresponding virtuous competence, judgment, etc. Again, see note 4 above. This leaves open the possibility that a person might, say, have defective epistemic motivation without meeting the threshold for the possession of an intellectual vice. Related to this, it also leaves open the possibility that virtues and vices should be understood as contraries vs. contradictories. Thanks to Heather Battaly for pressing me on this point. 12 I think something similar should be said about a person who, say, is born and raised in a community that prizes closed-mindedness and as a consequence lacks an accurate sense about when (etc.) to perspective-switch provided that the person’s evidence supports thinking of closed-minded activity as epistemically appropriate or beneficial (which seems possible given the community into which she’s been born). For it is difficult to see why engaging in intellectual activity that one judges (inaccurately but non-culpably) to be truth-conducive (say) should reflect negatively on who one is as a person (vs. on the results of said activity). Thanks to Heather Spradley for a helpful exchange on this issue. 13 This includes, for instance, work by Robert Adams (1985), Gary Watson (1996), George Sher (2006), and Angela Smith (2008). 14 This is consistent with the possibility that in their more sophisticated (i.e. less basic) forms, the skills proper to intellectual virtues can be quite demanding. 15 I say “unlikely” because there may be iterations of the case that would merit a different assessment. In particular, if the agency of the persons in question is manifested in their lack of the relevant ability or if they fail (culpably) to at least attempt to develop the skill when presented with opportunities to do so, then their lack of virtuous ability might reflect negatively on them qua persons and form the basis of an intellectual vice. Whether this would still be consistent with their satisfaction of the motivational condition on the corresponding virtue remains an open question, which I will revisit shortly. I’m grateful to Maura Priest and Heather Spradley for helpful input on this and related points.

The structure of intellectual vices 35 16 In fact, a similar point holds with respect to vice-constituting failures of epistemic motivation (and thus to finding #1). That is, a person’s defective epistemic motivation can suffice for the possession of an intellectual vice only if the person is (broadly) responsible for this motivation. I have waited to introduce the complication of inculpable failures of virtue only because I think inculpable failures of judgment and skill are more common or likely than inculpable failures of motivation. 17 There does not appear to be much agreement on what precisely such an account might involve or require. See e.g. Crerar 2018, Cassam 2016 and 2019, and Battaly 2015. However, I take it that my characterization is at least in the ballpark of these others. 18 Battaly (2015: 74) suggests something like this point. See also Zagzebski (1996: 207). 19 In opposition to this view, it is not enough to show that a person who in certain respects is epistemically well-motivated might nevertheless manifest a (culpable, vice-constituting) shortcoming of virtuous judgment or competence. For the same person might be poorly motivated in other respects, and this defective motivation might explain his defective judgment or competence. More on this point below. Were it stipulated that the person’s epistemic motives are entirely above board, the suggestion, again, is that his defective judgment or competence would not be culpable—or at least not culpable in a way that reflects negatively on his personal worth. I am grateful to Maura Priest for some helpful critical feedback on this point. 20 Whether this prior motivational failure is itself a vice-making feature vs. a mere psychological precondition for such is not an issue I will attempt to settle here. I do think it is an interesting question, however, and am grateful to Charlie Crerar for raising it. 21 I am much less doubtful about this in connection with the competence dimension. That is, it seems much less plausible that a person might, say, (1) culpably lack the ability to perspective-switch while being (2) genuinely motivated to deploy this ability. Accordingly, my focus here will be on the relationship between the motivational dimension and the judgment (vs. the competence) dimension. 22 See Crerar (2018: 759–760) for a related discussion. 23 My remarks on these cases, brief as they must be, are not intended as the final word. Several of the cases are complex and lacking in important details, and therefore capable of being interpreted in different ways and calling for different replies. Still, I hope my treatment of them makes clear that motivationalism is not obviously or immediately susceptible to them. 24 Tanesini (2018) defends a view like this. For her response to this case, see pp. 354–355. 25 There may, of course, be a version of this case in which Galileo is right to ignore the views and input of others (e.g. if he is transparently intellectually superior and they are transparently inferior on all relevant matters). But then his behavior would not, I take it, be intellectually arrogant (even if it might be perceived as such by those ignorant of the cognitive discrepancy). 26 If not, then there is no problem for motivationalism, since we no longer have a case of epistemic vice that (purportedly) can’t be explained in motivational terms. 27 Were this not the case—for instance, if Dave’s dismissal were entirely a function of how he was raised and he cannot in any sense be held responsible it—then the claim that Dave is viciously closed-minded, etc., would be much less plausible, as would any objection to motivationalism based on this case. 28 This is a helpful variation on Cassam’s (2016, 2019) Oliver case, which Crerar (2018) rightly notes is ambiguous. 29 It is less easily accommodated by Tanesini, who subscribes to a more demanding view of intellectual vice. For her discussion of this case, see her (2018: 356). 30 I am especially grateful to two students, Blake Colquitt and Josh Dolin, for several lengthy and rigorous conversations about the ideas developed in this chapter. I’m also grateful to my colleague (and friend) Dan Speak for the same. Heather Battaly, Charlie Crerar, Rie Iizuka, Maura Priest, and Heather Spradley provided very helpful and gen-

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References Adams, R. (1985) “Involuntary Sins,” The Philosophical Review 94(1): 3–31. Adams, R. (2006) A Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Aristotle. (1984) “Nicomachean Ethics,” in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Baehr, J. (2010) “Epistemic Malevolence,” Metaphilosophy 41: 189–213. Baehr, J. (2011) The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Baehr, J. (2015) “The Four Dimensions of an Intellectual Virtue,” in C. Mi, M. Slote, and E. Sosa (eds.), Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Western and Chinese Philosophy (New York: Routledge), 86–98. Battaly, H. (2015) Virtue (Cambridge: Polity). Battaly, H. (2018) “Can Closed-Mindedness be an Intellectual Virtue?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84: 23–45. Battaly, H. (2019) “Vice Epistemology Has a Responsibility Problem,” Philosophical Issues 29(1): 24–36. Cassam, Q. (2016) “Vice Epistemology,” The Monist 99: 159–180. Cassam, Q. (2019) Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Crerar, C. (2018) “Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96(4): 753–766. Kidd, I. J. (2017) “Capital Epistemic Vices,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6(8): 11–16. Montmarquet, J. (1993) Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Roberts, R. C. and W. J. Wood. (2007) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Sher, G. (2006) “Out of Control,” Ethics 116: 285–301. Smith, A. (2008). “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment,” Philosophical Studies 138: 367–392. Tanesini, A. (2018) “Intellectual Vice and Motivation,” Metaphilosophy 49(3): 350–367. Watson, G. (1996) “Two Faces of Responsibility,” Philosophical Topics 24(2): 227–248. Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

2

The metaphysical foundations of vice epistemology Quassim Cassam

2.1 Vice epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity and significance of intellectual or epistemic vices. Among the questions that vice epistemologists might reasonably be expected to answer are the following: 1 What kind of thing is an epistemic vice? 2 How are epistemic vices individuated? 3 To what are competing accounts of epistemic vices answerable? The first of these will be referred to here as the Kind Question, the second as the Individuation Question and the third as the Answerability Question. These three questions are ontological or metaphysical, and they bring into focus the metaphysical foundations of vice epistemology. The third question is especially pressing. Where there are disagreements about what to count as an epistemic vice, or about how specific vices are individuated, it is natural to wonder how such disagreements are to be resolved. Choosing between competing accounts of epistemic vice, or of particular epistemic vices, requires clarity about the facts to which rival theories are answerable. One approach to the Kind Question is vice monism. This says that epistemic vices are one kind of thing. One version of vice monism insists that epistemic vices are character traits. Other versions of vice monism can be imagined. Vice pluralism allows that there are different varieties of epistemic vice, between which it isn’t necessary or even advisable to choose. As well as character traits and attitudes, epistemic vices might include thinking styles, emotions, cognitive faculties and cognitive biases. Different vice pluralists have different views about what to include and what to exclude but they all agree that epistemic vices come in different shapes and sizes. They aren’t one kind of thing.1 For present purposes, to individuate an object or kind is to draw a boundary around it in thought or perception, to distinguish it from other objects or other kinds. Individuating in this sense is the same thing as differentiating, and differentiating is something that thinkers do. An indirect approach to the Individuation Question holds that specific epistemic vices such as dogmatism and closed-mindedness are

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individuated by analysing our concepts. Conceptual analysis seeks to identify conceptually necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept. It proceeds by the method of cases.2 In the present context, this means constructing and examining examples of epistemic conduct with a view to determining whether and how particular vice concepts apply in those cases. If there are cases in which, intuitively, the concept of closed-mindedness applies but the concept of dogmatism does not then this would support the conclusion that these are distinct vices. A direct approach holds that if our interest is in the individuation of epistemic vices then we should focus on those vices themselves rather than on our concepts of them. A similar point has been made by Hilary Kornblith in response to the suggestion that knowledge is best studied by analysing the concept of knowledge: ‘the subject matter of epistemology is knowledge itself, not our concept of knowledge’ (2002: 1).3 Something like this thought is the basis of the suggestion that the subject matter of vice epistemology should be our epistemic vices themselves rather than our concepts of them. But what would it even be to individuate epistemic vices themselves without engaging in conceptual analysis or employing the method of cases? The answer to this question is far from obvious. It conceivable that in reality the direct approach employs many of the same techniques for individuating epistemic vices as the indirect approach. In that case, one might conclude that the differences between the direct and indirect approaches are more ideological than practical.4 The Individuation Question leads directly to the Answerability Question. Where there are different and incompatible accounts of, say, the relationship between one epistemic vice and another, there is the challenge of deciding which one is better. It is hard to choose between rival accounts without having an answer to the Answerability Question. What is the reality to which the rival accounts are trying to do justice? Realism is the view that there can only be one thing to which accounts of epistemic vices are answerable: the nature of the vices themselves.5 The realist models the individuation and classification of vices on the individuation and classification of diseases. For example, disease taxonomies classify Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia as distinct forms of dementia because there is a real distinction between one condition and another. The physical basis of Alzheimer’s is different from the physical basis of vascular dementia. The boundary between one epistemic vice and another might not be physical but the realist nevertheless regards it as a real distinction. At the opposite extreme is conceptualism. In its most general form, conceptualism says that there are no lines in nature between one kind of thing and another.6 All distinctions between kinds or types are the product of conceptualisation. For present purposes conceptualism needn’t take a view about diseases but it does insist that the distinction between one epistemic vice and another is simply a reflection of a difference in concepts. There are no ‘real’ divisions to which the individuation of epistemic vices is accountable. All we have to go on is the ordinary usage of vice terms and our intuitions about where the line between one vice and another falls.7 This is very much in keeping with the indirect approach to the Individuation Question.

The metaphysical foundations 39 The three sections that follow will address, in turn, each of the three basic metaphysical questions for vice epistemology. In Section 2.2 a case will be made for vice pluralism. Section 2.3 will argue that the direct/indirect dichotomy is a false one and recommend a different way of proceeding, one that focuses on the function or purpose of vice attributions. It will be argued in Section 2.4 that neither realism nor conceptualism offers a satisfactory answer to the Answerability Question. The perspective to be developed here is more pragmatic. We cannot hope to understand what epistemic vices are, how they are individuated, or what makes one account better than another without a serious examination of whether and why it is useful (if it is) to describe people as epistemically vicious or virtuous. Section 2.5 will raise a question about the usefulness of vice attributions.

2.2 Vice monists tend to assume rather than argue explicitly for vice monism. For example, it is taken for granted by ‘responsibilists’ that epistemic virtues and vices are character traits. This is in line with Aristotle’s account of virtues as ‘states of character’ but is there an argument for the view that epistemic vices are limited to such states? One argument that can be extracted from the work of Linda Zagzebski is what might be called the argument from depth: the premise of this argument is that virtues and vices are deep traits of a person. A virtue, Zagzebski argues, is a ‘deep quality of a person, closely identified with her selfhood’ (1996: 104). Once a virtue or a vice develops, ‘it becomes entrenched in a person’s character and becomes a kind of second nature’ (1996: 116). These and other such formulations can be read as restricting virtues and vices to character traits on the grounds that only character traits can have the requisite depth. One question about the argument from depth is whether specifically intellectual virtues and vices need to be as deep as Zagzebski supposed. A vice is ‘a quality we would ascribe to a person if asked to describe her after her death’ (1996: 135) but there are minor intellectual vices such as obscurity or pretentiousness that would hardly merit a mention in a person’s obituary.8 It might also be objected that personal qualities other than character traits can be deep enough to count as vices. Many of a person’s attitudes are closely identified with her selfhood, but attitudes are stances or postures rather than character traits. In her list of intellectual vices Zagzebski includes prejudice and wishful thinking. Yet prejudice is a judgement or attitude rather than a character trait. Having strong prejudices might be a character trait but prejudices themselves aren’t character traits. Wishful thinking is a mode of thought rather than a character trait. If wishful thinking, prejudice and character traits like closed-mindedness are genuine epistemic vices, as they appear to be, then it follows immediately that epistemic vices aren’t one kind of thing. It is a further question whether the three types of epistemic vice all spring from a common root or whether two of the three types are somehow reducible to the third. These are not questions that will be addressed here, other than to say that there is no obvious way of reducing the three types to one. It certainly looks like there are epistemic vices of genuinely different kinds.9

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An explicit theoretical defence of vice pluralism has been provided by Heather Battaly.10 Her argument is this: virtues are qualities that make one an excellent person whereas vices are qualities that make us worse people. These very thin general conceptions of virtue and vice can be fleshed out in different ways. Having a hard-wired cognitive faculty like excellent vision is one way to be an excellent person. Another way is to be open-minded. By the same token, bad vision is one way to be a defective person, closed-mindedness is another. Bad vision and other such defects are ‘reliabilist’ vices whereas closed-mindedness is a ‘responsibilist’ vice. In this way, Battaly’s pluralism accommodates both varieties of epistemic vice. It also accommodates two different intuitions about virtues and vices. One is that luck plays an important role in whether we are virtuous or vicious. The other is that bad effects over which one has no control should not render one vicious. Reliabilism accommodates the first intuition, responsibilism the second, but vice pluralism accommodates both. One concern one might have about this argument for vice pluralism centres on the idea of a better or worse person. It is far from obvious that cognitive disabilities, such as bad vision or forgetfulness, make one a ‘worse person’.11 One does not become a worse person if one loses one’s vision as a result of an illness or the ageing process. Care also needs to be taken here to avoid suggestions of ableism. Furthermore, as Liezl van Zyl has argued, the reliabilist and responsibilist intuitions about virtue and vice that Battaly seeks to accommodate are not just different but incompatible. If luck plays an important role in whether we are virtuous or vicious then why can’t bad effects over which one has no control render one vicious? It is not a virtue of vice pluralism that it endorses contradictory verdicts about what does and doesn’t constitute a vice. This is not an objection to vice pluralism per se but to one specific version of this doctrine. There are, however, other less contentious ways of being a vice pluralist. One way is to be an obstructivist.12 Obstructivism refrains from claiming that epistemic vices make one a worse person. It argues that the intuitive notion of an epistemic vice is that of a personal quality that, as Medina puts it, ‘gets in the way of knowledge’ (2013: 30). Epistemic vices systematically obstruct the gaining, keeping or sharing of knowledge. The personal attributes that do that are a mixed bag. They include character traits like closed-mindedness, attitudes like prejudice and arrogance and modes of thinking such as wishful thinking. In that case, why not also include conditions such as insomnia that make it harder to gain and retain knowledge? One reason for excluding insomnia is that epistemic or intellectual vices must be conditions of the intellect. In addition, being epistemically vicious is something for which a person can fairly be blamed or criticised. This rules out insomnia as well as forgetfulness, even though the latter might be regarded as a condition of the intellect. This version of vice pluralism is relatively relaxed about admitting additional varieties of epistemic vice. It doesn’t insist that only character traits, attitudes and modes of thinking can be epistemic vices. It allows that it can sometimes be hard to say whether something is or is not an epistemic vice. Cognitive biases might not qualify if they aren’t personal qualities or defects for which a person can be blamed or criticised. It isn’t clear, however, that they aren’t personal attributes

The metaphysical foundations 41 or that people can’t be criticised for their biases. The key point is that in the first instance epistemic vices make one a worse gainer, keeper or sharer of knowledge rather than a worse person.13 On one issue, however, obstructivism is in complete agreement with Battaly: epistemic vices are not one kind of thing.

2.3 How are epistemic vices individuated? How do we draw the line between one epistemic vice and another? Even if the subject matter of vice epistemology is our epistemic vices themselves, it is arguable that our concepts are our only guide to their structure. This would explain why conceptual analysis is the appropriate method for vice-individuation. The labelling of this approach as ‘indirect’ might be questioned on the basis that there is no alternative ‘direct’ method. For example, if we are interested in understanding the relationship between closedmindedness and dogmatism the only effective way of doing that is to analyse the corresponding concepts. If these concepts are such that it is possible for one of them to apply without the other applying then the only reasonable conclusion would be that these are in fact distinct vices.14 Battaly’s work is again relevant here since she argues that there are indeed requirements for dogmatism that aren’t requirements for closed-mindedness.15 The latter is an unwillingness or inability to engage with relevant intellectual options. It does not require one to have already made up one’s mind. Dogmatism does. It is an unwillingness to engage seriously with relevant alternatives to the beliefs one already holds. On this account, dogmatism is a form of closed-mindedness but it is possible to be closed-minded without being dogmatic. The basis of such claims is conceptual analysis. As Battaly recognises, other analyses of the relationship between closed-mindedness and dogmatism are possible. For example, she considers and rejects the proposal that closed-mindedness is an unwillingness or inability to transcend a default cognitive option.16 In effect, she employs the method of cases to undermine this proposal: she devises cases in which it seems that a person is genuinely closed-minded without having, non-trivially, a default cognitive option or position. The necessary conditions for closed-mindedness that interest Battaly are conceptually necessary, and disputes about such conditions are notoriously difficult to resolve. The method of cases might be employed to determine what is conceptually necessary for closed-mindedness but will not provide a resolution if people have conflicting intuitions about whether a given case is or is not a genuine case of closed-mindedness. A given individual’s intuitions about hypothetical cases might be a guide to their concept but it is a further question to what extent they reveal conceptually necessary conditions for the application of ‘the’ concept of closed-mindedness.17 One might take the view that there isn’t a single, univocal concept, and that there is bound to be an element of stipulation in an individual theorist’s conception of what it is to be closed-minded. There is, however, another way of proceeding. Instead of individuating epistemic vices by conceptual analysis one might instead ask how, when and why it is

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useful and appropriate to employ vice concepts – concepts of epistemic vices – to attribute epistemic vices to another person. With luck, an answer to this question will shed some light on how epistemic vices are individuated. The inspiration for this approach is Edwards Craig’s ‘state of nature’ account of knowledge.18 Craig describes himself as ‘creeping up on the concept of knowledge’ (1990: 3) by asking what its role in our life might be. Its purpose ‘should be at least as interesting as its analysis’ (1990: 2), and this leads to the suggestion that ‘the concept of knowledge is used to flag approved sources of information’ (1990: 11). The fact that this is what the concept is used for is a clue to what its characteristics might be. When a person is judged to be closed-minded or dogmatic or to display some other epistemic vice, such vice attributions appear to serve a number of different purposes. They can be explanatory, evaluative or cautionary.19 We suppose that a person’s epistemic conduct can sometimes be explained by their epistemic vices. In attributing an epistemic vice to someone we are also implicitly evaluating them on account of their being epistemically vicious in that respect. The implicit evaluation is negative rather than positive. Finally, the judgement that someone is epistemically vicious can serve as a warning to proceed with caution in relying on them for knowledge or understanding. To say that vice attributions are used to explain, evaluate and warn is to make a point about what might be called their functional role and, by implication, the functional role of vice concepts. If V1 and V2 are both epistemic vices but attributions of V1 have a different functional role from attributions of V2 then that is an indication that V1 and V2 are distinct vices. An illustration of the explanatory role of vice attributions is the well-documented case of the Yom Kippur surprise.20 On Yom Kippur 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on two fronts. Israel’s military was taken by surprise despite the prior availability of excellent intelligence indicating an impending attack. A subsequent study by Uri Bar-Joseph and Arie Kruglanski blamed the intelligence failure on the closed-mindedness of Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence and his senior Egyptian Affairs specialist.21 The study concluded that these individuals ignored evidence of an impending attack because they had a particularly high need for cognitive closure and had already made up their minds that Egypt and Syria would not attack. The ‘because’ in this formulation is both causal and explanatory. Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski’s hypothesis is that the attribution of the epistemic vice of closed-mindedness to two senior intelligence officers enables us to explain their lapses. If these individuals had been more open-minded, they might have been more inclined to pay attention to clear indications that Egypt and Syria were preparing to attack. In explaining an event like the Yom Kippur surprise by reference to the epistemic vices of specific individuals, it is important to mark certain distinctions. There is, for example, the distinction between an intelligence analyst who is committed to a particular doctrine – say the doctrine that Egypt and Syria wouldn’t attack – and an analyst who is disposed to ignore evidence against whatever he happens to believe but who is not committed in advance to a specific doctrine. Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski mark this distinction by distinguishing between the non-specific and specific need for closure. The former is ‘the desire for a confident

The metaphysical foundations 43 judgment on an issue, any confident judgment as compared to confusion and ambiguity’ (2003: 80). The latter is ‘the desire for a judgment of a particular content’ (2003: 80). A person with a specific need for closure has a specific bias, not just a bias against any view that is opposed to his. A different way to mark this distinction would be distinguish the dogmatism of the intelligence analyst whose need for closure is specific from the mere closedmindedness of the analyst whose need for closure is non-specific. Even if both analysts are dismissive of evidence pointing to an impending attack the explanation is different in the two cases. The dogmatic analyst is dismissive of such evidence not simply because of a general disposition to stick to his guns but because the evidence is at odds with a specific doctrine – that the Arabs wouldn’t attack – to which he is dogmatically committed. The merely closed-minded analyst would have been receptive to evidence of an attack if he already believed that an attack was likely. He is dismissive of such evidence only because he happens already to have concluded that the Arabs wouldn’t attack and has a general disposition to be dismissive of information that is at odds with his prior conception, whatever that conception happens to be. In this example, closed-mindedness and dogmatism are distinguished not by analysing the corresponding concepts but by reflecting on the role of vice attributions in enabling us to flag salient differences between different explanations of a person’s epistemic conduct. It might even be hypothesised that concepts like closed-mindedness and dogmatism came into being as subtly distinct concepts precisely in order to make it possible for us to draw correspondingly subtle explanatory distinctions. These and other epistemic vice concepts earn their keep by helping us to make sense of the many different ways in which a person’s epistemic conduct can be flawed. A satisfactory account of how specific epistemic vices are individuated must track differences in their explanatory roles. With regard to the evaluative function of vice attributions, one view is that, as Gabriele Taylor puts it, ‘merely to use the labels “virtue” and “vice” is to indicate candidates for praise and blame’ (2006: 6). It should be noted, however, that our evaluative repertoire is much more extensive than this suggests.22 There are vices for which people are criticised but not blamed. Stupidity, understood as foolishness rather than lack of intelligence, is one such vice. In George Sher’s terminology, epistemic vices cast a ‘negative shadow’ over the person whose vices they are but different vices do this in different ways.23 Virtue and vice attributions are evaluative in the way that references or letters of recommendation are evaluative, and this has a bearing on how virtues and vices are individuated. What we expect from a person who is described in a letter as arrogant is different from what we expect from a person who is described as overconfident. This is a sign that arrogance and overconfidence are not the same vice. In the same way, closedmindedness and dogmatism aren’t the same epistemic vice if they generate different expectations. Reflection on such differences is a tool for delineating epistemic vices. V1 and V2 are not the same epistemic vice if the epistemic conduct one would expect from someone who has V1 is different from the epistemic conduct one would expect from a person who has V2.

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Letters of recommendation can be cautionary as well as evaluative. A letter that goes into great detail about a person’s epistemic vices but is silent about their virtues is sending a message to the reader: for example, do not hire this person. Different epistemic vices provide different reasons for rejecting a candidate. Again, this tells us something about the relationship between one vice and another. The fact that a person is arrogant might not be seen as a reason for rejecting their application to be a foreign exchange trader. In contrast, overconfidence might be regarded as a fatal defect. V1 and V2 are not the same epistemic vice if it is coherent to regard V1 but not V2 as relevant to a person’s suitability for a particular professional role.24 How can they be the same vice if it matters whether they have V1 but not whether they have V2? Is the functional role approach to the Individuation Question direct or indirect? The case for treating this approach as indirect is that it seeks to individuate epistemic vices by reflecting on various aspects of vice attributions. On the other hand, the functional role approach doesn’t offer an analysis of the vice concepts that are employed in vice attributions and does not see itself as creeping up on the concept of an epistemic vice. Just as Craig’s state of nature theory can be read as an account of knowledge rather than just the concept of knowledge, so there is nothing wrong with regarding the study of epistemic vice attributions as revealing the nature of the epistemic vices themselves.25 There is little to be gained by describing the functional role approach either as ‘direct’ or as ‘indirect’. What matters is whether, one way or another, it tells us something about the nature of the vices to which it is applied.

2.4 What are the implications of the functional role approach to the Individuation Question for the Answerability Question? To put this issue into context, consider again the contrast between realism and conceptualism. Realism insists that philosophical accounts of epistemic vices are answerable to the nature of the vices themselves and that the distinction between one vice and another is a real distinction. Epistemic vices are like diseases or other natural kinds and are no less real. Like natural kinds, they have real essences, though not physiological real essences. The realist’s motto is that there are lines in nature and these lines include the line between one vice and another as well as one disease and another.26 It is not clear, however, in what sense the distinction between one epistemic vice and another is a ‘distinction in nature’. One might suppose that epistemic vices have psychological rather than physiological essences. For example, the need for closure might be posited as the psychological essence of closed-mindedness. Yet it is conceivable that what grounds a person’s closed-mindedness is not a need for closure but arrogance. By the same token, people aren’t motivated to be stupid by an independently identifiable need or desire. This makes it hard to see in what sense epistemic vices have psychological real essences. Realism helps itself to the idea that epistemic vices are ‘natural’ but does little to address the suspicion that its conception of naturalness lacks substance.

The metaphysical foundations 45 What is the conceptualist alternative to realism? The commitments of conceptualism are highlighted by Locke’s theory of ‘mixed modes’. Modes are dependent existences that can only exist as the qualities of a substance. Simple modes are combinations of the same simple idea whereas mixed modes combine ideas of several different kinds.27 For example, theft is a mixed mode since the idea of theft is the idea of the concealed change of possession of something without the consent of the proprietor. Locke maintains that ideas of modes are ‘voluntary Collections of simple Ideas, which the Mind puts together, without any reference to any real Archetypes’ (II.xxxi.3).28 It follows that these ideas can’t fail to be adequate since, as Ayers puts it on Locke’s behalf, we form these ideas ‘without the need to refer to reality’ (1991: 57).29 Consider the idea of courage: He that at first put together the Idea of Danger perceived, absence of disorder from Fear, sedate consideration of what was justly to be done, and executing it without that disturbance, or being deterred by the danger of it, had certainly in his Mind that complex Idea made up of that Combination: and intending it to be nothing else, but what it is; nor to have any other simple Ideas, but what it hath, it could not also be but an adequate idea: and laying this up in his Memory, with the name Courage annexed to it, to signifie it to others, and denominate from thence any Action he should observe to agree with it, had thereby a Standard to measure and dominate Actions by, as they agreed to it. (II.xxxi.3) It is reality that sets the standard for our ideas of substances. With mixed modes, our ideas set the standard for reality, so that an action is courageous just if it has the features that our idea of courage brings together. Locke doesn’t deny that ideas of mixed modes can be formed by observation. For the most part, however, ideas of modes are the products of invention, of the ‘voluntary putting together of several simple Ideas in our own minds’ (II.xxii.9), without prior observation. It is, in an important sense, arbitrary how we choose to put together simple ideas to form complex ideas of mixed modes. A striking consequence of Locke’s conceptualism is that there is no external standard by reference to which disputes about what is and is not part of the idea of mixed modes can be settled. Again Locke uses the example of courage to make his point. Suppose that one person X’s idea of a courageous act includes the idea of ‘sedate consideration’ of ‘what is fittest to be done’ (II.xxx.4). This is the idea of ‘an Action which may exist’, but another person Y has a different idea according to which a courageous action is one that is performed ‘without using one’s Reason or Industry’. Such actions are also possible, and Y’s idea is as ‘real’ as X’s. An action that displays courage by X’s lights might fail to do so by Y’s lights and vice versa, but it seems that the only respect in which Y’s idea might count as ‘wrong, imperfect, or inadequate’ (II.xxxi.5) is if Y intends his idea of courage to be the same as X’s. Apart from that, both ideas are equally good and equally valid. Suppose, then, that one vice epistemologist insists, while another denies, that closed-mindedness involves an unwillingness to engage seriously with relevant

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alternatives to the beliefs one already holds. Can it not be argued in this case that both ideas of closed-mindedness are equally good and valid? Not if one of the two ideas does a significantly better job of flagging a distinction that is important for the purposes of explanation or evaluation. If it is important for such purposes to distinguish epistemic vice V1 from another vice V2 then the distinction between these vices is not arbitrary and there is something beyond our ideas to which it is answerable: the fact that some explanations are better than others.30 If a distinction is useful or even indispensable in practice then it is, at least to this extent, a real distinction in a non-quixotic sense of ‘real’. Much depends, therefore, on whether it is true, as argued above, that certain ways of delineating epistemic vices such as closed-mindedness and dogmatism are better than others, better, that is, relative to an interest in explaining and evaluating people’s epistemic conduct. If so, then this is the reality to which competing accounts of our epistemic vices are answerable. It is also the reality that conceptualism is in danger of disregarding if it insists that the choice between competing accounts of epistemic vices is arbitrary or that there is no need to refer to reality in deciding where to locate the line between one epistemic vice and another. There may be forms of conceptualism that play down the arbitrariness of vice individuation, but the extreme conceptualism about mixed modes to which Locke is committed is not one of them.31 Realism is also problematic since the functional role approach does not support the idea that epistemic vices are natural kinds or that the line between one epistemic vice and another is analogous to the distinction between one disease and another. This is not the sense in which the distinction between two epistemic vices is a ‘real’ distinction. An analogy might help to make the point clearer: a taxonomy of belief that is interested in explaining human action, and not just categorising it, will almost certainly have to recognise religious beliefs as a distinct type of belief. One reason, perhaps, is that religious beliefs have a distinctive content but it is also true that a person’s religious beliefs can explain many aspects of their conduct – the fact that they pray regularly, for example – that their non-religious beliefs cannot. Religious beliefs have a distinctive functional role.32 However, few would be tempted by the notion that there is a real distinction ‘in nature’ between the religious and non-religious beliefs, or that religious beliefs constitute a natural kind. An unqualified realism about types of belief is a non-starter, and the same goes for an unqualified realism about epistemic vices. In both cases, it is necessary to find a middle way between conceptualism and realism. A label for this middle way is conceptualist realism.33 A less cumbersome label that captures the link between the reality of a distinction and its usefulness is pragmatism. The Answerability Question invites vice epistemologists to decide whether competing accounts of epistemic vice are answerable to our concepts or to extra-conceptual reality. Conceptualist realism regards this as a false choice. Since our concepts and classificatory choices are shaped by reality it follows that the two options aren’t mutually exclusive. The way that epistemic vices are individuated is both a reflection of our conceptual scheme and the explanatory

The metaphysical foundations 47 and other realities by which our thinking is influenced. Epistemic vices lack the ontological stability of genuine natural kinds but they aren’t arbitrary constructs if they enable us to make sense of epistemic reality, including numerous varieties of flawed epistemic conduct that are part of that reality.

2.5 For the conceptualist realist the crux of the matter is whether vice attributions are actually as useful as has been claimed here. If one epistemic vice is distinguished from another on the basis that they explain different things it had better be the case that epistemic vices are explanatory. In offering an explanation of the flawed epistemic conduct of people who should know better, vice attributions offer a partial but significant answer to certain ‘how-possible’ questions.34 For example: how was it possible for Israeli military intelligence to overlook or ignore compelling evidence of an impending attack? Because of the epistemic vices of key individuals in the story of the Yom Kippur surprise. What might otherwise be hard to understand becomes intelligible in the light of the vice attribution or, as one might call it, the vice explanation. A vice explanation is not an explanation of an epistemic vice but an explanation of a person’s conduct by reference to an epistemic vice. It might be objected that vice explanations lack the explanatory power that has been claimed for them and that they only serve to obscure more pertinent factors in many cases. For example, from the standpoint of what Mark Alfano calls ‘epistemic situationism’, a person’s epistemic conduct usually has much more to do with situational factors than with intellectual or other character traits.35 Some situationists even see this as part of an argument against the very existence of such traits and, by implication, the existence of intellectual character vices. Yet there are many examples of defective epistemic conduct that are not amenable to explanation in situational terms. For example, much has been written about the conduct of senior members of the Bush administration in the run-up to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. The flaws in this conduct have been attributed to a wide variety of epistemic vices, including arrogance, imperviousness to evidence and an inability to deal with mistakes.36 It is questionable whether in this case there are plausible situational alternatives to such vice explanations. Other alternatives to vice explanations focus on sub-personal, socio-structural or ideological factors. For example, belief in conspiracy theories has been explained by reference to the intellectual vices of conspiracy theorists but some psychologists argue that conspiracy theories are sustained by sub-personal biases such as proportionality and intentionality bias.37 A socio-structural approach might be encouraged by studies that indicate that a tendency to see conspiracies everywhere is associated with adverse life circumstances.38 Finally, there is evidence that conspiracy theories are associated with extremist political ideologies, including anti-Semitic ideologies.39 A person who subscribes to such an ideology might be more inclined to endorse ideologically motivated conspiracy theories. In such cases, it is the person’s ideology rather than their epistemic vices that is the

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key to their thinking. The importance of ideology tends to be underestimated by vice epistemologists. There are apparently epistemic failings that have more to do with politics than anything else.40 One question that arises is whether ideological explanations are an alternative to vice explanations. It might be suggested, for example, that a commitment to extremist ideologies is itself something that calls for an explanation in terms of the extremist’s epistemic vices. On the other hand, it is important not to underestimate the extent to which ideologies are expressive of a person’s values. At least on the face of it, the fact that a person is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist says more about their moral failings than their epistemic vices. Hitler did what he did and believed what he believed because he was morally depraved and not because he was closed-minded. No doubt he was closed-minded, but when it comes to explaining his conduct his epistemic vices pale into insignificance when compared to his moral defects. The lesson of such examples is that one and the same phenomenon can be explained at multiple different levels and by reference to multiple different factors: situational, ideological, moral, psychological and epistemological. To describe a person as closed-minded is, in effect, to pass comment on their psychology and their epistemological outlook. Vice explanations can be trumped by explanations of other types, and it’s not clear in such cases whether there is even such a thing as the ‘right’ explanation. Vice epistemologists are perhaps too inclined to promote vice explanations of what they see as flawed epistemic conduct even in cases where plausible alternative explanations are available.41 This is an epistemic vice of vice epistemologists. The contrary intellectual virtue that they need to cultivate is the virtue of only resorting to vice explanations where such explanations are called for. As the case of the Yom Kippur surprise shows, there are cases where such explanations are more compelling than any alternative. If this were not so the appeal of vice epistemology would be considerably diminished. Given that vice explanations are sometimes successful, the remaining question is how a person’s epistemic vices are to be explained. José Medina proposes that vices like arrogance and closed-mindedness are among the structural and systematic vices of the privileged.42 If this proposal is correct then there is an opening here for vice explanations to take account of socio-structural factors. However, the fact that some of the epistemic vices that figure in vice explanations are amenable to explanation in socio-structural terms is not a reason for doubting their existence. It remains true that it is sometimes plausible and necessary to explain why people think and reason as they do by reference to their epistemic vices. That is the reality to which philosophical thinking about epistemic vices is answerable.43

Notes 1 For a defence of vice pluralism see Battaly 2014 and 2015a. For a critique, see Van Zyl 2015. 2 There is a vast philosophical literature on the method of cases. See, for example, Goldman 2007, Kornblith 2007 and Sosa 2007.

The metaphysical foundations 49 3 By focusing on the concept of knowledge, Kornblith argues, ‘we only succeed in changing the subject: instead of talking about knowledge, we end up talking about our concept of knowledge’ (2002: 9–10). 4 For further discussion of these issues see Kornblith 2002, especially chapter 1. 5 As Ian James Kidd notes, epistemic vices have historically been held to be answerable to metaphysically deep features of the world. What Kidd (2018) calls ‘deep epistemic vices’ are ones whose identity and intelligibility are ultimately determined by a deep conception of human nature or the nature of reality. 6 As David Wiggins puts it, ‘there are no “lines” in nature (even though, after the imposition of lines, there are edges for us to find there). It is we, sharing the benign illusion that there is just one way to do this, who impose lines on nature, not arbitrarily or in just any way, but in ways that are determined for us by our constitution and ecology, by the scale appropriate to our physical size in relation to the rest of the world, and by our intellectual and practical concerns’ (1986: 170). The view that there are conceptindependent lines in nature is defended in Ayers 1991. 7 Except in the case of comparatively esoteric epistemic vices, in relation to which we may have no strong intuitions. 8 It should be noted, however, that what counts as a major or minor epistemic vice is highly context-relative. 9 See Cassam 2019a for a defence of this approach. 10 See, for example, Battaly 2015a and 2015b. Pluralism, as Battaly understands it, is the view that there are different kinds of virtues and that ‘different qualities can make one a better person in different ways’ (2015a: 9). 11 The claim that it does is made by Heather Battaly. She writes: ‘Vices are qualities that make us defective people … a person can be defective in a variety of ways: for instance, she can be defective insofar as she has bad vision; or insofar as she lacks logical skills; or insofar as she is dogmatic, unjust, or cruel’ (2014: 52). 12 See Cassam 2019a for an exposition and defence of obstructivism. 13 I leave open the possibility that epistemic vices make one a worse person by making one a worse gainer, keeper, or sharer of knowledge. 14 Distinct concepts like water and H2O can be concepts of the same property but in this case it isn’t possible for one of these concepts to apply without the other applying. If there are cases in which the concept of closed-mindedness applies but the concept of dogmatism does not then these are distinct concepts and distinct properties. 15 See Battaly 2018. 16 She attributes this view to Jason Baehr. 17 For present purposes a concept can be understood as ‘a psychological structure or state that underpins a cognizer’s deployment of a natural-language predicate’ (Goldman & Pust 2002: 83). If people have markedly different contents associated with one and the same predicate, then, as Goldman and Pust note, ‘philosophical analysis must be satisfied with using intuitions to get at each person’s distinct concept; it must be prepared, if necessary, to abandon the assumption that the content of each person’s concept can be generalized to others’ (2002: 86). However, Goldman and Pust are not convinced that this is necessary. 18 In Craig 1990. 19 A fuller account of the functional role of vice attributions would also need to take account of what Ian James Kidd calls ‘epistemic vice-charging’, the critical practice of charging other people with epistemic vice. According to Kidd, ‘the practice of vicecharging should ultimately be ameliorative’ (2016: 192). 20 See Bar-Joseph & Kruglanski 2003, Bar-Joseph 2005, and Cassam 2019a: 28–52. 21 Bar-Joseph & Kruglanski 2003. 22 As Julia Driver points out, ‘we sometimes, and indeed often do, make critical comments about someone’s intellect without blaming them’ (2000: 132). 23 Sher 2006: 58. 24 On the role relativity of virtues and vices, see Pigden 2017.

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25 It is an odd and unnecessary feature of Craig’s account that he insists on representing it as an account of the concept of knowledge. 26 It is worth noting that the distinction between one disease and another is less ‘natural’ and less straightforward than realism assumes. As Peter Toon notes, debates about the boundaries of a disease are often ‘really evaluative debates about the boundary between illness and wellness’ (2014: 57). Furthermore, when a disease is defined on the basis of a continuous variable ‘the normal and the abnormal merge imperceptibly into each other, so the boundary is to some extent arbitrary’ (2014: 58). The realist who insists that there are sharp distinctions in reality between epistemic vices is thinking specifically of diseases with sharp boundaries and that are defined on a categorical variable. For example, it isn’t possible to have a touch of bubonic plague. See Cassam 2017 for further discussion of the analogy between epistemic vices and diseases. 27 Locke’s examples of mixed modes include beauty, theft, obligation, drunkenness, a lie, hypocrisy, sacrilege, murder, appeal, triumph, wrestling, fencing, boldness, habit, testiness, running, speaking, revenge, gratitude, polygamy, justice, liberality and courage. This list is from Perry 1967. 28 All references in this form are to a book, chapter and section of Locke 1975, originally published in 1689. 29 Locke illustrates the arbitrariness of mixed modes by noting that we have the complex idea of patricide but no special idea for the killing of a son or a sheep. 30 An explanation as I understand it is part of the natural world, and might remain undiscovered. For an account of the contrast between this ‘objectivist’ conception of explanation and more subjectivist approaches, see Bird 2005. 31 Locke’s conceptualism is a form of what David Wiggins calls ‘anti-realist conceptualism’, as distinct from ‘sober conceptualism’. Anti-realist conceptualism holds that nothing prevents us from dissecting reality completely differently from what we are used to. See Wiggins 1980: 138–140. 32 Their functional role is not unrelated to their content. 33 This label is borrowed from Wiggins 1980. 34 See Cassam 2007 for an account of the nature of how-possible questions. 35 Alfano 2013. 36 See Ricks 2007 and Cassam 2019a: 1–27. 37 An intellectual vice account of conspiracy theories is given in Cassam 2015. For a response see Pigden 2017. A cognitive bias approach is defended in Brotherton 2015. 38 Freeman & Bentall 2017. 39 See Byford 2011 and Cassam 2019b. 40 This is the central point of Cassam 2019b. 41 See Cassam 2015 for an example of this. 42 Medina 2013: 30. 43 For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank Heather Battaly, Josh Dolin, Ian James Kidd and other participants at the April 2019 UConn Vice Epistemology Conference.

References Alfano, M. (2013), Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ayers, M. R. (1991), Locke, volume 2: Ontology (London: Routledge). Bar-Joseph, U. (2005), The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources (Albany: State University of New York Press). Bar-Joseph, U. and Kruglanski, A. (2003), ‘Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise’, Political Psychology, 24: 75–99. Battaly, H. (2014), ‘Varieties of Epistemic Vice’, in J. Matheson and R. Vitz (eds.), The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 51–76.

The metaphysical foundations 51 Battaly, H. (2015a), ‘A Pluralist Theory of Virtue’, in M. Alfano (ed.), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory (New York/London: Routledge): 7–22. Battaly, H. (2015b), Virtue (Cambridge: Polity Press). Battaly, H. (2018), ‘Closed-Mindedness and Dogmatism’, Episteme, 15: 261–82. Bird, A. (2005), ‘Explanation and Metaphysics’, Synthese, 143: 89–107. Brotherton, R. (2015), Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (London: Bloomsbury Sigma). Byford, J. (2011), Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Cassam, Q. (2007), The Possibility of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cassam, Q. (2015), ‘Bad Thinkers’, Aeon (https://aeon.co/essays/the-intellectual-chara cter-of-conspiracy-theorists). Cassam, Q. (2017), ‘Vice Ontology’, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 6: 20–27. Cassam, Q. (2019a), Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cassam, Q. (2019b), Conspiracy Theories (Cambridge: Polity Press). Craig, E. (1990), Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Driver, J. (2000), ‘Moral and Epistemic Virtue’, in G. Axtell (ed.) Knowledge, Belief, and Character: Readings in Virtue Epistemology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.): 123–34. Freeman, D. and Bentall, R. (2017), ‘The Concomitants of Conspiracy Concerns’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 52: 595–604. Goldman, A. (2007), ‘Philosophical Intuitions: Their Target, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status’, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 74: 1–26. Goldman, A. and Pust, J. (2002), ‘Philosophical Theory and Intuitional Evidence’, in A. Goldman (ed.), Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 73–94. Kidd, I. J. (2016), ‘Charging Others with Epistemic Vice’, The Monist, 99: 181–97. Kidd, I. J. (2018), ‘Deep Epistemic Vices’, Journal of Philosophical Research, 43: 43–67. Kornblith, H. (2002), Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kornblith, H. (2007), ‘Naturalism and Intuitions’, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 74: 27–49. Locke, J. (1975), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Medina, J. (2013), The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Perry, D. L. (1967), ‘Locke on Mixed Modes, Relations, and Knowledge’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 5: 219–35. Pigden, C. R. (2017), ‘Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Vicious?’, in K. LippertRasmussen, K. Brownlee, and D. Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell): 120–132. Ricks, T. E. (2007), Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin Books). Sher, G. (2006), In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Sosa, E. (2007), ‘Intuitions: Their Nature and Epistemic Efficacy’, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 74: 51–67.

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Taylor, G. (2006), Deadly Vices (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Toon, P. (2014), A Flourishing Practice? (London: Royal College of General Practitioners). Van Zyl, L. (2015), ‘Against Radical Pluralism’, in M. Alfano (ed.), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory (New York/London: Routledge): 22–34. Wiggins, D. (1980), Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Blackwell). Wiggins, D. (1986), ‘On Singling out an Object Determinately’, in P. Pettit and J. McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought, and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 169080. Zagzebski, L. (1996), Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

3

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege Vice epistemology and the epistemology of ignorance Alessandra Tanesini

At the start of the #metoo protests, many men professed genuine surprise about the prevalence of sexual harassment, whilst many women could not figure out how men could have been so ignorant. Black people have long observed that a similar apparent commitment to ignorance about race is widespread among whites. In a blog post originally written in 2004, the British journalist, Reni EddoLodge, reported that she had given up talking about race to white people because the majority simply refuse to accept the reality of structural racism. She notes that when she speaks, she can see that “their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals” (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. ix). This chapter offers a vice-epistemological account of the ignorance of those who are invested in not knowing, with a special focus on white ignorance, understood as a kind of racial insensitivity. I have two main aims. The first is to show that some forms of ignorance are the product of epistemic vices, conceived as sensibilities. The second is to explain the mutually re-enforcing connection that exists between arrogance, ignorance, and privilege. The chapter consists of three sections: the first offers a definition of active ignorance. The second provides an account of one epistemically vicious sensibility – racial insensitivity. The third section illustrates how arrogance feeds on privilege, produces ignorance, and widens inequalities that entrench privilege.

3.1 Varieties of ignorance Ignorance is a heterogeneous phenomenon. It comprises at least the presence of false beliefs, and the absence of true ones. One may thus define ignorance in the following terms: a person is ignorant about a fact that p, whenever that person either disbelieves p (e.g., believes that it is false), or suspends belief about it (e.g., has not settled on either p or not p), or has no doxastic attitude toward p (e.g., the thought as to whether p has never entered her mind) (Peels, 2017, p. 169).1 These states of ignorance can be brought into being in different ways. Basic or plain ignorance occurs when disbelief, belief suspension, or absence of doxastic attitude are the result of mere accident, bad luck, or of cognitive shortcomings. Thus, for instance, a person might be ignorant of many mathematical truths,

54 Alessandra Tanesini because he has never studied mathematics. Whilst his lack of interest might find deeper and troublesome explanations in some cases, it might also on occasion be the result of an autonomous choice to focus one’s intellectual efforts elsewhere. Active ignorance, on the other hand, has a different and less savoury aetiology. I borrow the term from theorists of the epistemology of ignorance (Medina, 2013; Mills, 2007; Sullivan & Tuana, 2007; Tuana, 2006). At first pass, one can define it as “the kind of ignorance that is deeply invested in not knowing” (Medina, 2016, p. 182). There are broadly speaking at least three kinds of psychological and social mechanisms whose involvement in the production of the state of ignorance makes that output an instance of active ignorance. First, ignorance can be the result of cognition that is motivated by goals other than accuracy.2 One might list self-deception and wishful thinking among its paradigmatic examples. Second, ignorance might be the result of deception, misinformation, and doubt-mongering. Central cases include the ignorance of people who have been lied to, who have been targeted by propaganda and misinformation campaigns.3 Third, ignorance might be the product of finding oneself in a cognitive niche that promotes it, and whose success at fostering ignorance makes the niche self-sustaining. Supermarkets are a good example of this phenomenon. They are designed to maximise the chances of impulse buying by fostering the right amount of shoppers’ ignorance of the location of goods on the shelves. Supermarket staff achieve this goal of the company by moving things around often enough to cause some confusion, but not so often as to alienate their customers.4 What these three kinds of case have in common is that in these instances ignorance is the product of, in Medina’s words, “epistemic labour” (Medina, 2016). That is, active ignorance is the output of mechanisms – psychological and social – functioning well, rather than failing to operate or malfunctioning. These are mechanisms that are either designed or selected for their ability to obfuscate or misinform. This is why active ignorance is ignorance as a perverse kind of achievement (Spelman, 2007; Tanesini, 2018b). It is useful to compare this tripartite characterisation of active ignorance with the taxonomy provided by Tuana (2006). Tuana singles out six forms of ignorance, not all of which are active in the sense described above. Wilful ignorance, understood as the will not to know, and ignorance that flows from a lack of interest in things that should be of concern to one, fit the motivated cognition paradigm. In these cases, individuals are ignorant because they adopt a strategy of looking away, ignoring, or simply avoiding thinking too hard. Ignorance that is a result of being kept ignorant by the actions of others fits the deception paradigm. As Tuana points out there are at least two forms of such ignorance. The first is the dissemination of propaganda and the active blockage of the transmission of useful information.5 The second is the constant undermining of people’s confidence in their own epistemic authority. This process can result in a tendency not to trust one’s own convictions that increases ignorance by undermining the ability to form full beliefs. Ignorance can also be the result of systemic environmental mechanisms that block the development of knowledge. This fifth case fits the paradigm of cognitive niches that scaffold ignorance.

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 55 Active ignorance is thus heterogeneous. It is also often connected to moral and epistemic vices. In some cases ignorance is the outcome of epistemically vicious motivations to ignore something to which one should attend. In other cases, ignorance is the effect of other people’s malevolent intentions toward one. In addition, it would seem that ignorance is a characteristic outcome of several epistemic character vices such as laziness and, as I argue in the final section of this chapter, intellectual arrogance. That said, ignorance is not always bad. For example, sometimes there are moral requirements not to know some things in order to safeguard others’ privacy (cf. Manson, 2012). Ignorance can also be of instrumental epistemic value. For instance, good experimental design often requires that scientists are ignorant of whom is receiving a placebo when testing the efficacy of a drug. Therefore, there are cases when being wilfully ignorant is not epistemically vicious but might actually be virtuous.6 A difference between good and bad ignorance lies in the conscious or subconscious ultimate motives for keeping oneself ignorant. The kind of active ignorance that I identify as intellectually vicious is often driven by morally bad motivations, such as the desire to feel superior to other people or to avoid thinking about one’s complicity in injustice. Another difference between good and bad ignorance lies in its purpose. Some ignorance is ultimately in the service of knowledge and of good moral outcomes. Vicious ignorance, instead, generally obstructs effective and responsible inquiry.7 All of these forms of ignorance differ from Tuana’s sixth kind of ignorance which she calls “loving ignorance”. This ignorance is not really ignorance per se since it is an acknowledgment of the epistemic limitations of one’s own perspective. It is, thus, akin to the adoption of an attitude of humility. Whilst active ignorance, when driven by bad motivations, is often invisible to the ignorant person, loving ignorance consists precisely in making one’s first-order ignorance visible. Thus understood, loving ignorance is actually knowledge, rather than ignorance, of one’s own ignorance. The notion of active ignorance that I have sketched here is related to, but not the same as, Charles Mills’ notion of white ignorance (2007, 2015). Mills’ notion is more restricted since it focuses exclusively on ignorance that is caused by social facts about whiteness conceived as a structure of domination, rather than as a biological construct. Hence, Mills’ account does not include those forms of ignorance that are the result of different social structures that rank some groups as superior and others as inferior such as heteronormativity or patriarchy. It is easy, however, to see how one could provide accounts of straight or male ignorance along Millsian lines. Mill’s account of ignorance, however, might elide rather than help to clarify the differences between types of active ignorance. In his view, white ignorance is ignorance that is caused by, in the sense of being counterfactually dependent on, some social facts about whiteness (Mills, 2015, p. 218).8 The account entails that, for example, a black person’s ignorance of higher mathematics if it is counterfactually dependent on white privilege as a structural injustice is an instance of white ignorance. I agree with Mills that this would be an instance of active

56 Alessandra Tanesini ignorance. However, it is also a kind of ignorance that is very different in nature from a white person’s ignorance about the facts of her own white privilege. In my view in order to develop ways of minimising the occurrence of active ignorance we need theories that detail the differences among types of ignorance more than Mills’ account does. Relatedly, because he does not focus on the differences among kinds of active ignorance, Mills’ account would need supplementation if we are to make principled distinctions between instances of active ignorance where the ignorant person should have known better from cases where ignorance is less culpable. That said, as I mention below, our moral focus when addressing this pernicious ignorance should not be directed toward apportioning blame. Instead, we should strive to take responsibility for our ignorance and help others to see the importance of doing the same. I have argued that active ignorance is heterogeneous. In this chapter, I focus on one of its species. My interest is with ignorance that is the result of a morally dubious desire not to know. This is active ignorance as motivated ignorance where the motivations driving cognition are morally questionable and at variance with accuracy. The motives that I discuss here are primarily related to the need to selfenhance and feel good about oneself.9 Broadly speaking, this kind of ignorance has two flavours. The first involves motivated cognition that leads to the formation of false beliefs.10 It can be thought as a will not to know. It is exemplified by wishful thinking and by other forms of motivated believing (cf., Scott-Kakures, 2000). The second involves motivated avoidance of cognition that leads to the absence of belief. It can be thought as comprising strategies of cultivated disengagement with issues or studied avoidance of investigation often out of fear of what one might discover (Spelman, 2007). Motivated ignorance, unless it is the outcome of a conscious decision and in the service of moral and epistemic goods, is hard to dislodge because it tends to be invisible to those who suffer from it.11 The sturdiness of this kind of ignorance is partly explained by its irrationality. It is impossible to sustain a wishful belief whilst being fully aware of its wishful nature. Suppose, for example, that one believes that one’s intellectual achievements are wholly attributable to one’s hard work and talents rather than, to some extent, to one’s white privilege. If one came to realise that one holds this belief because one is in fact complicit in an unjust system that unfairly benefits one, rather than because of the evidence suggesting it is true, one could not hold on to the belief and to the positive view of oneself. More broadly, because of the constitutive links of belief to truth or to justification, the discovery that one has no good epistemic reasons for a belief that one holds for motives other than accuracy undermines one’s ability to sustain that belief. Since, however, one’s non-epistemic motives for holding onto the belief are strong, the pedigree of the belief must be of necessity invisible to one. The invisibility of the kind of motivated ignorance that results in the absence of true belief rather than the presence of false ones is caused by a different dynamic.12 These are cases where subjects are motivated to avoid cognition and the resultant belief formation. These cognitive strategies are also invisible to

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 57 the agent when the motives for thought avoidance are morally objectionable by one’s own lights. Since omissions based on such motives are violations of one’s personal standards, they are inconsistent with one’s conception of oneself. They have therefore the potential to generate experiences of extreme discomfort. Individuals tend to reduce this cognitive dissonance by justifying their behaviour.13 This leads to the formation of self-serving explanations of the reasons motivating ignorance. This is the dynamic at work, for instance, when white people refer to their ignorance to justify their lack of engagement with discussion of race. They might explain that they do not know about such things and do not wish to offend by misspeaking. Whilst such claims might on a few occasions be evidence of “loving ignorance”, they often are ways of denying one’s complacency about, and perhaps complicity in, the mechanisms that keep white privilege in place (DiAngelo, 2012). This second form of motivated ignorance might be more widespread among those who occupy dominant positions. If one is sufficiently privileged so that he can insulate himself from some realities, it is easier to preserve one’s absence of belief than to work to sustain one’s false believing. The person who thinks that his achievement is wholly due to his efforts and talents is often in the presence of potential counterevidence.14 He is therefore frequently forced to discount or explain away these considerations. This approach is cognitively costly because it requires a lot of effortful motivated cognition. It is also possibly quite uncomfortable since it involves numerous instances of dissonance-inducing events that one must work hard to reduce. Simply ignoring the issue, if one can do this, is instead less cognitively effortful. One does not have to constantly find new ways to dismiss counterevidence. Instead, one might simply fail even to entertain whether one’s achievements might be at least in part due to one’s own racial privilege. Ignorance in these cases is, as they say, bliss.

3.2 Ignorance as a vicious sensibility In this section I provide a vice-epistemological account of some forms of motivated ignorance. I argue that individuals who have a high dispositional tendency to motivated ignorance manifest a vicious sensibility that is a kind of epistemic vice. I first briefly outline the view that epistemic vices include sensibilities as well as character traits. I explain what a vicious sensibility consists in by way of a contrast with the epistemically virtuous sensibility of being observant. Finally, I compare my account of this type of vice with Medina’s view that racial insensitivity is a kind of numbness. Within this framework I illustrate the affective and motivational aspects of motivated ignorance. I thus show that ignorance is not a purely doxastic phenomenon. Epistemic vices are not all of one kind.15 Some are character traits such as, arguably, intellectual arrogance and dogmatism. Others are bad cognitive habits such as always jumping prematurely to conclusions. But there are also epistemic vices that are best described as sensibilities. They involve deploying one’s faculties in ways that systematically hinder effective and responsible inquiry.16 Vices

58 Alessandra Tanesini as sensibilities include the sensibilities that are responsible for motivated ignorance but also for testimonial injustices (Fricker, 2007). The idea that virtues and vices are, or include, sensibilities has a long tradition in virtue ethics. It is often endorsed by defenders of the view that moral facts can be perceived by those who have developed the right kind of sensitivity (Clarke, 2018; McDowell, 1998). In epistemology, Hookway’s (2003) account of the epistemic virtue of being observant is an analogue of this approach. Twentytwenty vision is not sufficient to be excellent at acquiring knowledge by means of sight. While it is true that without reliable vision, one is not able to observe well, in order to excel one must also be a skilled observer.17 What is characteristic of the observant person is that she is motivated and able to direct her attention to those portions of the visual field that are salient given her overall epistemic goals. Since foveal vision is more accurate than peripheral vision, in order to see well we need to know where to look. Being observant thus presupposes being skilled at looking. That is, being observant requires knowing-how to look. In short, the epistemic virtue of being observant includes the skill of looking in the right places given one’s epistemic goal combined with the motivation to deploy that skill. While vision is a native cognitive faculty, good observation is learnt. A range of activities require good observational skills. These include working as a radiographer or as an ornithologist. Those who are good at these professions have been taught how to observe. Slowly, they have acquired the ability to look in the right places, and to interpret what they see. They have learnt to notice what is salient, and to make sense of visual patterns that are possibly ambiguous or would be just a mess to the untrained eye. Examples such as these demonstrate that the virtue of being observant is learnt through practice. They also indicate that this virtue is highly domain-specific. The excellent radiologist might not make an excellent ornithologist and vice-versa. Partly this is explained by the fact that observation relies on the possession of a large amount of knowledge. The person who knows nothing about cancer cannot tell what to look for in an X-ray. These considerations suggest that there is not one virtue of being observant in general. Rather, insofar as being observant is an acquired skill, this virtue is relative to a field of knowledge. Thus, there is one virtue of being observant for a radiographer and another for a bird watcher. Being observant in a given domain, I have argued, involves a skill that importantly includes directing one’s attention to the locations in the visual field that are salient given one’s epistemic goals. These are the locations that can supply the information required to arrive at accurate answers to the questions that implicitly or explicitly guide one’s perceptual activity. For example, the observant fish watcher directs her attention to the gills in order to ascertain whether, given the general appearance of the fish that she is looking at, she is in the presence of a surgeon or a doctor fish. This direction of attention is on occasion based on conscious decisions as in the example just supplied. At least as often, however, it is initiated by emotional responses to the situation. The radiographer for instance might have her attention captured by a pattern on the X-ray that causes her to feel anxious or

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 59 worried. Her anxiety makes her look more closely at that location in the visual field rather than focus her attention elsewhere.18 These considerations point to the crucial motivational contribution of affective states, such as episodic emotions, to the virtue of being observant. Emotions supply the motivational impetus to search for relevant visual information, but they also direct that search by capturing attention to some locations that are identified as salient and marked as positive or negative.19 We are now able to see why being observant is better thought of as a sensibility, that includes an affective component, rather than as a pure cognitive skill. Knowing how and where to look involves being emotionally attuned to one’s current situation. The radiographer becomes good at her job partly by training her emotional responses to the X-ray (cf. Lance & Tanesini, 2004). Through trial and error, practice and mentoring, she acquires the ability to look at an X-ray quickly and only to pay close attention to those areas that at first sight worry her or cause some anxiety. This emotional training is the development of a sensibility that makes her visually sensitive to the facts that are salient given her epistemic goals. One way to understand vicious sensibilities is to contrast them with virtuous ones. More specifically, one might think that the vices opposed to the virtue of being observant include all the multifarious ways in which one may lack this virtue and thus be rightly described as inobservant. Here, I adopt a different take. I reserve the label of epistemic vice for the presence of sensibilities that make one insensitive to what is salient given one’s epistemic goals. In short, if virtue consists in the presence of a sensibility that is an emotional response that is sensitive to what matters, vice is not the mere absence of virtue, but the presence of a kind of sensibility that comprises the emotional response of being insensitive to what is salient given one’s epistemic goals.20 A person who lacks the virtue of being observant might be someone who has her head in the clouds. She is often lost in her own thoughts and does not pay much attention to her immediate surroundings. If employed as a bartender, this person may fail to notice whether customers are present, or the order in which they need to be served. This person’s behaviour can be usefully contrasted with that of a person who, because of her motivated ignorance, tends to overlook older white women when serving customers. This behaviour is very common. Some people, including white women who have entered middle age, often experience the feeling that they are invisible because they are not addressed or made eye-contact with: they are, literally, overlooked. The people who do not pay attention to them are not distracted by their own thoughts. They are paying attention to other people. Their attention is captured by the white men, or, on occasion, the younger white women in the room. These people have trained their emotional reactions to focus on some people as salient and to discount the presence of people of different kinds as distractors to ignore. They have tuned out some people and attuned themselves to detect others. In short, they have cultivated insensitivity to the presence, needs, or features of some people. It is this sort of acquired insensitivity that can be vicious morally and epistemically if it deflects one’s attention away from at least some of one’s moral and epistemic goals.

60 Alessandra Tanesini I have argued that epistemic virtues can be sensibilities that involve skilled emotional responses that are sensitive to what is epistemically salient (given some of the agent’s goals) in the surrounding environment. Conversely, some epistemic vices are sensibilities that involve emotional responses that are trained to be insensitive to, by failing to direct attention to or guiding attention away from, what is epistemically salient (given some of the agent’s goals) in the surrounding environment.21 In what follows, I first explain the role of insensitive sensibility in motivated ignorance, before comparing my account to Medina’s view that racial insensitivity is a kind of numbness. I have described motivated ignorance as ignorance (that is, absence of true belief or presence of false belief) that results from a desire not to know. I have also claimed that in its least cognitively effortful incarnation, such ignorance is the product of avoidance of cognition. This avoidance is cultivated, and it presupposes that one is sufficiently privileged to be able to afford not having an opinion on a given issue. That is, one must to some extent enjoy the luxury of not needing to know in order to satisfy the need not to know.22 One way in which people habituate themselves to remaining ignorant is by becoming insensitive. Thus, insensitivity as a sensibility is a frequent component of motivated ignorance. There is more to motivated ignorance than the development of this kind of sensibility, but its acquisition is often a pre-requisite of motivated ignorance at least in those cases in which the motivations driving such ignorance are morally or epistemically dubious. The account offered above is largely consistent with Medina’s view that active ignorance about race is a form of insensitivity that he describes as a kind of numbness (Medina, 2016). What I have presented here fleshes out, and generalises, some aspects of his insightful proposals. I wish, however, to highlight a worry about his description of insensitivity in general and racial insensitivity in particular as numbness. Medina justifies this terminological choice on at least two grounds. First, he wants to highlight the affective dimension of insensitivity. Second, he wishes to jettison the term, often used in the relevant literature, “blindness” because of its discriminatory connotations (Medina, 2013, pp. xi–xiii). I share these motivations and agree that “numbness” is an improvement on “blindness”. However, numbness is often used to indicate an overall loss of emotional tone. The person who is numb is the person who, for whatever reasons, feels nothing. Those who would rather not know the truth about racial privilege and how they benefit from it are likely to lack empathy for the plight of ethnic minorities. Hence, they are numb in that sense. Numbness, however, might not be an important component of their emotional reactions to black people. Insensitivity as a sensibility might, and often does, involve heightened emotional reactions (Ashton-James & Tracy, 2012; Haddock & Gebauer, 2011). The person who is motivated not to know about white privilege might be extremely sensitive to the bodily presence of her black work colleagues. She might experience physical closeness as discomforting; she might avoid eye and bodily contact and increase the physical distance between her and them (Amodio & Devine, 2006).

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 61 These behaviours are the result of negative emotional reactions to black people. These emotional reactions often draw attention away from what is epistemically salient in these circumstances because they prevent one from paying attention to what is being said or to how one is treating one’s colleagues. Thus, racial insensitivity as a sensibility is often characterised by a negative emotional stance that leads one to avert one’s eyes and body away from the other person. In turn, this aversion results in not noticing, because one is ignoring, what is epistemically salient for one in the exchange. The description of some of the behaviour characteristic of racial insensitivity as a sensibility bears close connections to what is described in the psychological literature as aversive racism (Pearson et al., 2009). Aversive racism is often defined as implicit prejudice and avoidant behaviour in the context of sincerely held, non-prejudicial beliefs accompanied by good intentions. Thus, aversive racists are those who are implicitly biased, even though they explicitly hold egalitarian views. I sidestep the issues of implicit bias here (cf. Holroyd, this volume). Instead, I focus on the combination of avoidant behaviour with egalitarian beliefs about racial groups to highlight three points that serve to clarify the nature of racial insensitivity and to support the claim that it is an epistemically vicious sensibility. First, insensitive sensibilities are epistemically deficient because they consist of trained emotional responses that draw attention away from what is epistemically salient in context. The empirical literature on aversive racism also indicates that these sensibilities lead to limited searches for considerations that are relevant to belief formation. Aversive racists are closed-minded because they are motivated not to look extensively for relevant evidence (Roets et al., 2015). The account of aversive behaviour as an expression of an insensitive sensibility explains why and how such narrow search occurs. Emotions play a crucial role by capturing and directing attention to the features of the environment that are relevant to find information required to form accurate answers to the questions guiding one’s epistemic inquiry. Insensitive sensibilities involve emotional responses that inhibit wide searches for information whilst directing attention away from what matters epistemically and toward other features of the situation that one’s fear or anger highlights as important (Maio & Haddock, 2015, ch. 6; Tiendens & Linton, 2001). Second, the negative emotional reactions that capture attention in cases of insensitive sensibility are often not fitting. These reactions misrepresent the situation since black people are not usually a threat. Further, they lead one astray because they direct attention in ways that inhibit the formation of accurate judgements about the situation. In this way, insensitive sensibilities are at the service of the agents’ desire to be ignorant and avoid noticing things. However, they also undermine agents’ own epistemic goals since these ostensibly include acquiring an adequate understanding of the situation they find themselves in. Those white students who keep silent because they claim to know nothing about race, would, if asked, justify their ignorance by citing the difficulty of gaining information. They would not claim disinterest in the issue. I presume here that, even though

62 Alessandra Tanesini they may be somewhat deluded, these students are not lying. They genuinely want to know about race. However, their non-conscious desire not to know is stronger. This is also why it is possible for some of these students to have egalitarian beliefs about racial groups. Third, the suggestion that insensitive racial sensibilities might be associated with aversive racism raises questions about people’s moral responsibility for their racially insensitive sensibility. There are several reasons against blaming individuals for their sensibilities and for the active ignorance that they promote. First, blame attributions might prove counterproductive since there is evidence that people, when they are labelled as vicious, change their behaviour to fit the label provided that they find the description somewhat plausible (Alfano, 2013, pp. 96–97). Thus, blaming people for their racist sensibilities might make them more racist. Second, it is often the case that others lack the required standing to cast aspersions on those whose sensibilities are insensitive to race. For example, it would be hypocritical of many who suffer from the same vices to blame others for theirs.23 That said, whilst backward-looking blame attribution might be sometimes unwarranted and frequently inadvisable, there is scope for promoting the taking of responsibility, irrespective of culpability.24 That is, there are sound moral reasons why we should all take shared responsibility for addressing the extensive moral and epistemic harms caused by motivated ignorance and other forms of active ignorance. With regard to racial insensitivity, the beneficiaries of white privilege have special responsibilities to acknowledge and address their epistemic limitations.25

3.3 Ignorance and arrogance Arrogance, including intellectual arrogance, always tends to bring ignorance in its trail.26 In this concluding section, I present an explanation of why this might be the case. Arrogance, I argue, promotes ignorance because the self-important self-conception that is the trademark of the arrogant can only be sustained by purposeful cultivated self-ignorance. I have shown elsewhere that there is a kind of arrogance that I have labelled superbia that consists in a disposition to do others down in order to excel (Tanesini, 2016, 2018a). Those who have this character trait gain their sense of self-worth by feeling superior to other people. This form of arrogance manifests itself in behaviours designed to “big oneself up”, such as bragging, boasting, or arrogating special entitlements, and in activities that diminish other people by humiliating or intimidating them and discounting or dismissing their views. Ultimately, these behaviours are in the service of defending a sense of self-esteem whose positivity is fragile. For this reason, I have argued, arrogance is best thought of as a defensive form of high self-esteem (Tanesini, 2018a, 2019). If, as I hope it is granted, despite differences in ability and achievement among human beings, no person is likely to be superior to all his acquaintances in all respects, the individual who, in order to think well of himself, needs to feel

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 63 superior to others can only sustain a sense of superiority at the price of self-delusion. He is likely to be ignorant about at least some of his own weaknesses and of other people’s strengths. His ignorance is motivated by the need to self-enhance. This motivation skews cognitive processes such as reasoning, thinking, evaluating, remembering, and perceiving. The desire to enhance one’s sense of selfworth biases cognition in at least two ways. First, it restricts the range of potential evidence that is considered. The person whose thinking is driven by the need to boost the ego focuses attention only on those factors that promote or inhibit the satisfaction of this need. Second, it skews outcomes by setting asymmetry of error costs (Scott-Kakures, 2000). For a person who feels that his self-esteem is under attack, mistaking a threat for something non-threatening is costlier than the opposite error. This person needs less evidence to conclude that something is a threat to his self-esteem than he would need to reach the opposite conclusion. Hence, arrogant individuals are extremely defensive and always ready to pounce in anger. Arrogance therefore can only be sustained by actively remaining ignorant. But an individual’s motivations are not sufficient to keep themselves ignorant. Ignorance is often a luxury that only the privileged can afford. I have claimed that the arrogant person can sustain self-belief only by feeling that he is better than others. I have also argued that he can maintain this feeling only by avoiding inconvenient truths and being very selective with the evidence. However, in nonpathological cases, even individuals who are arrogant might be forced to modify their opinions of their own abilities if they are faced with inconvertible evidence of failure or with evidence that other people do not hold them in high regard. It is virtually impossible for people who belong to less powerful groups to avoid encountering such evidence that chastises any arrogance they might harbour. Their self-esteem is likely to be deflated by their awareness that many members of dominant groups think of them in negative terms. This low selfesteem might be experienced as shame for whom one is (Fanon, 1986). In addition, proper pride often spurs stigmatised individuals to try hard in order to prove society wrong. Unfortunately, such attempts often result in underperformance, because of the influence of fear of failure on cognitive activity (Steele, 2010). In short, the combined effect of society’s judgement and of anxiety when faced with stereotype-threat inducing situations provides those who are subordinated with plenty of genuine and misleading evidence of their shortcomings. Members of privileged groups instead can more easily avoid facing such potential evidence. Their privilege affords them a good education and other opportunities to improve their abilities. In addition, other members of society generally presume that they are capable, intelligent, and morally upright. They are frequently praised for their successes whilst their shortcomings are often explained away as due to bad luck or other circumstances beyond their control. Further, they might often even have the luxury of not-trying to achieve. They are thus able to explain their successes as the product of natural talent and rationalise failures as the result of lack of interest and application. Either way, no possible outcome could be treated as evidence of lack of ability. This strategy, known as self-handicapping, is practiced by those whose high self-esteem is defensive (Lupien et al., 2010).

64 Alessandra Tanesini At Oxford and Cambridge third-class degrees – the lowest of the honours degrees – are widely regarded as better than upper second (the degree classification just below a first) because they show that one had other interests and, unlike slightly better degrees, do not provide evidence that one is not the smartest. Of course, it is only those whose third-class degree is from Oxbridge who can afford this strategy. They are likely to have connections that will secure good jobs in any case. What these considerations show is that arrogance is hard to preserve in the absence of social privilege.27 This is because arrogance is predicated on being able to sustain a large dose of motivated self-ignorance and is thus often accompanied by an insensitive sensibility to the facts of one’s privilege. The privileged are best placed to insulate themselves sufficiently from reality to avoid confronting their own limitations. So, arrogance requires ignorance and frequently presupposes privilege, but arrogance also bolster the inequalities that constitute privilege. I have claimed that the arrogant person diminishes others in order to feel superior to them. These behaviours often succeed in undermining other people’s efforts. Those who are arrogant put obstacles in the way of others’ success; they humiliate and intimidate them. As a result, the recipients of these behaviours are prevented from developing their abilities to their full potential. Hence, arrogant behaviour contributes to creating those social inequalities it requires to sustain itself less effortfully.28 This chapter has primarily focused on the relations between two epistemic vices – racial insensitivity and intellectual arrogance – and active ignorance because of their tight connections. I have argued that privilege often enables the kind of ignorance that arrogant people cultivate in order to persevere in their arrogant ways. I have also indicated that the development of insensitive sensibilities is often crucial when keeping oneself ignorant of the things one does not want to know. It is likely that other epistemic character vices such as laziness, for example, might be closely related to sensibilities that are especially suited to the production of ignorance (Medina, 2013, pp. 145–148). The exploration of these connections would be required to provide a fuller account than I was able to provide here of the relations between the epistemologies of vice and of ignorance.

Notes 1 I set aside here the issue whether true belief which is short of knowledge is a kind of ignorance which is at the centre of the dispute between supporters of the standard and of the new view of ignorance (Le Morvan & Peels, 2016). I merely wish to record that in my view there are cases where a person is not ignorant of a fact because they have a true belief about it, even though their belief is not knowledge because it is not sufficiently justified. 2 On motivated cognition see Kunda (1990). 3 These are the topic of several contributions to Proctor and Schiebinger (2008). 4 I have discussed these three kinds of case in my (2018b). I should add that they are not mutually exclusive because one piece of ignorance can be the product of both deception and self-deception, for instance. 5 But note that one can be complacent or even complicit about the process; when this happens one is deceived or misinformed but also engages in processes of self-obfuscation.

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 65 6 Thanks to Quassim Cassam and Ian Kidd for independently pressing this point. 7 I have argued elsewhere for a motivational account of what makes epistemic vices vicious (2018c). 8 His gloss on causation as counterfactual dependence might also open his account to well-known counterexamples that beset these theories of causation. 9 There is good social psychological evidence supporting the view that this is an important motivation in attitude formation and maintenance (Watt et al., 2008). 10 Or to the withholding of belief about whether p or not p. 11 The reason for such invisibility is cognitive dissonance (see note 13 below). This is not the same mechanism discussed by Cassam (2015, 2019) when arguing that some vices are stealthy. 12 That said, there is bound to be some overlap between these strategies for keeping oneself ignorant. In both kinds of case agents will to some extent avoid considering inconvenient evidence and engage in biased information gathering activities. 13 This is what is predicted by the Self-Standards model of cognitive dissonance. For an overview, see Cooper (2008, pp. 104–116). 14 Unless, that is, he can afford to insulate himself from such evidence. In the final section I show how social privilege creates the opportunities for such insulation. 15 The view that not all epistemic vices are character traits is ably defended by Cassam (2019, this volume). 16 I borrow the notion of effective and responsible inquiry from Cassam (2016). This is inquiry that reliably leads to knowledge and that leads to blameless belief because it is belief that does not violate any intellectual obligations. As I explain below, I do not think of sensibilities as being vicious exclusively because their bad effects but also because of the motivations that animate them. 17 One can subscribe to the view that sensibilities are only virtuous if they are reliable without endorsing a virtue-reliabilist account for them. My suggestion that they have an emotional component indicates that sensibilities are virtuous only when they have both good effects and good motivations. 18 On the view that emotions capture attention and thus motivate us to look in the right places for information that leads to accurate judgement see Brady (2013). For a defence of the role of anxiety in good judgment see Kurth (2018). 19 Emotions do not need to be themselves epistemic reasons for belief to fulfil this role, so they need not be akin to perceptions of values. Instead, they may serve as mechanisms for accessing those reasons by being something like conscious alarm bells that are reliably connected to unconscious processing. When the bell rings we are alerted to where to go to find answers. 20 Insensitivity might involve lack of awareness of what is actually salient or an excessive preoccupation with some aspects that are not salient or are not deserving of the level of attention that is directed at them. Hence, oversensitivity is in my vocabulary a form of insensitivity since it entails that one’s sensibility is not well-calibrated or sensitive to what is salient. 21 In my account vicious sensibilities are self-stultifying because they are driven by goals –such as to feel good about oneself – rather than the desire for accuracy that the agent also has but which is not efficacious in directing attention. It is also possible that an agent lacks epistemic goals that they should have. Such an individual might be rightly criticisable for her disinterest which causes her ignorance. However, in cases such as this one, it is at best unclear whether what is at work is some of sort of insensitive sensibility or a shortcoming of a different kind such as the presence of an epistemic character vice. Thanks to Alice Monypenny and to Quassim Cassam for pressing this point. 22 Hence, active ignorance is oftentimes the obverse of the epistemically privileged standpoint of the subordinated (Collins, 2000, p. 11; Mills, 2007, p. 15). 23 Tognazzini and Coates (2018) offer an overview of some of these issues concerning the moral standing of would-be blamers.

66 Alessandra Tanesini 24 On the distinction between backward-looking attributions of responsibility and a forward-looking assumption of responsibility see Card (1996). See Medina (2013, ch. 4) for an extensive discussion of the conditions under which one might be said to be responsible for one’s ignorance. 25 See Medina (2013) for an extensive discussion of how to resist insensitivity. 26 The converse does not appear to hold about motivated ignorance in general. However, a case can perhaps be made that racial insensitivity, as a particular type of motivated ignorance, is often a symptom of complacency. The latter, even though not necessarily arrogant, is something that can only be afforded by the privileged. 27 This is one of the reasons why arrogance is a vice associated with privilege and entitlement. I do not intend to suggest either that all privileged individuals are arrogant or that they are the only people beset by this character trait. Rather, my point is that privilege facilitates the formation of an arrogant character, whilst underprivilege is a kind of reality check that makes arrogance much less likely. 28 I would like to thank Alice Monypenny, Quassim Cassam, and Ian James Kidd for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to Heather Battaly for organising the Vice Epistemology Conference where this chapter was first aired. Thanks also to audiences at the Universities of Connecticut, Glasgow, and Kent for their comments on some of this material.

References Alfano, M. (2013). Character as Moral Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amodio, D. M., & Devine, P. G. (2006). Stereotyping and evaluation in implicit race bias: evidence for independent constructs and unique effects on behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(4), 652–661. Ashton-James, C. E., & Tracy, J. L. (2012). Pride and prejudice: how feelings about the self influence judgments of others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(4), 466–476. Brady, M. S. (2013). Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Card, C. (1996). The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cassam, Q. (2015). Stealthy vices. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 4(10), 19–25. Cassam, Q. (2016). Vice epistemology. The Monist, 99(2), 159–180. Cassam, Q. (2019). Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cassam, Q. (2020). The metaphysics of vice epistemology. In Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam (eds.), Vice Epistemology, 37–52. London: Routledge. Clarke, B. (2018). Virtue as a sensitivity. In N. E. Snow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue (pp. 35–56). New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (10th Anniversary ed.). New York/London: Routledge. Cooper, J. (2008). Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory. Los Angeles, CA/London: SAGE. DiAngelo, R. (2012). Nothing to add: a challenge to white silence in racial discussions. Understanding & Dismantling Privilege, 2(1), 1–17. Eddo-Lodge, R. (2017). Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race. London: Bloomsbury.

Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege 67 Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). London: Pluto Press. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Clarendon. Haddock, G., & Gebauer, J. E. (2011). Defensive self-esteem impacts attention, attitude strength, and self-affirmation processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1276–1284. Holroyd, J. (2020). Implicit bias and epistemic vice. In Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam (eds.), Vice Epistemology (pp. 126–147). London: Routledge. Hookway, C. (2003). Affective states and epistemic immediacy. Metaphilosophy, 34(1–2), 78–96. Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498. Kurth, C. (2018). The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties and Virtues of Anxiety. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Lance, M., & Tanesini, A. (2004). Emotion and rationality. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 34(sup1), 275–295. Le Morvan, P., & Peels, R. (2016). The nature of ignorance: two views. In R. Peels & M. Blaauw (Eds.), The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance (pp. 12–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lupien, S. P., Seery, M. D., & Almonte, J. L. (2010). Discrepant and congruent high selfesteem: behavioral self-handicapping as a preemptive defensive strategy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 1105–1108. Maio, G. R., & Haddock, G. (2015). The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change (2 ed.). London: SAGE. Manson, N. C. (2012). Epistemic restraint and the vice of curiosity. Philosophy, 87(02), 239–259. McDowell, J. H. (1998). Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Medina, J. (2016). Ignorance and racial insensitivity. In R. Peels & M. Blaauw (eds.), The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance (pp. 178–201). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, C. W. (2007). White ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (pp. 13–38). Albany: State University of New York Press. Mills, C. W. (2015). Global white ignorance. In M. Gross & L. McGoey (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (pp. 217–227). London/New York: Routledge. Pearson, A. R., Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2009). The nature of contemporary prejudice: insights from aversive racism. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(3), 314–338. Peels, R. (2017). Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press. Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Roets, A., Kruglanski, A. W., Kossowska, M., Pierro, A., Hong, Y.-y., James, M. O., & Mark, P. Z. (2015). The motivated gatekeeper of our minds: new directions in need for closure theory and research. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 221–283.

68 Alessandra Tanesini Scott-Kakures, D. (2000). Motivated believing: wishful and unwelcome. Noûs, 34(3), 348–375. Spelman, E. V. (2007). Managing ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (pp. 119–131). Albany: State University of New York Press. Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. New York/London: W. W. Norton. Sullivan, S., & Tuana, N. (eds.). (2007). Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tanesini, A. (2016). ‘Calm down, dear’: intellectual arrogance, silencing and ignorance. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 90(1), 71–92. Tanesini, A. (2018a). Arrogance, anger and debate. Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 5(2 (Special issue on Skeptical Problems in Political Epistemology, edited by Scott Aikin and Tempest Henning)), 213–227. doi:10.5840/symposion20185217 Tanesini, A. (2018b). Collective amnesia and epistemic injustice. In J. A. Carter, A. Clark, J. Kallestrup, S. O. Palermos, & D. Pritchard (eds.), Socially Extended Epistemology (pp. 195–219). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tanesini, A. (2018c). Epistemic vice and motivation. Metaphilosophy, 49(3), 350–367. Tanesini, A. (2019). Reducing arrogance in public debate. In J. Arthur (ed.), Virtues in the Public Sphere (pp. 28–38). London: Routledge. Tiendens, L. Z., & Linton, S. (2001). Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: the effects of specific emotions on information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 973–988. Tognazzini, N., & Coates, D. J. (2018). Blame. In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed., pp. 1–42). Retrieved from https://plato.s tanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/blame/. Tuana, N. (2006). The speculum of ignorance: The women’s health movement and epistemologies of ignorance. Hypatia, 21(3), 1–19. Watt, S. E., Maio, G. R., Haddock, G., & Johnson, B. T. (2008). Attitude functions in persuasion: matching, involvement, self-affirmation, and hierarchy. In W. D. Crano & R. Prislin (eds.), Attitudes and Attitude Change (pp. 189–211). New York: Psychology Press.

4

Epistemic corruption and social oppression Ian James Kidd

The dominant understanding of vice, virtue, and character needs to be revised in light of the recognition by feminist theorists, among others, that character is not simply a matter of what is inside the individual, for which the individual is wholly and solely responsible, but is also a matter of interpersonal, social, cultural, and political contexts. (Robin Dillon, 2012: 90)

4.1 Character and oppression A key insight of liberatory philosophies is a double connection between character and social oppression. The operation of oppressive social systems requires oppressors characterised by what Lisa Tessman calls ‘the ordinary vices of domination’, such as cruelty, indifference, contempt, and arrogance, which make for ‘degraded’, ‘twisted’ forms of moral character (2005: 54). Correspondingly, subjection to behaviours and systems characterised by such vices itself will tend to damage the characters of the oppressed, causing what Tessman, inspired by the work of Claudia Card (1996), dubs ‘moral damage’, in the sense that ‘the self under oppression can be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues’ (2005: 4). Such characterological damage has been explored through feminist and critical race-theoretic philosophies within the Western tradition, at least back to early work by Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft at the start and end of the seventeenth century (see Kidd 2019a: §2). Although much of this work has focused on forms of damage to moral character, there has been a latent sensitivity to damaged epistemic characters, too. Astell and Wollstonecraft’s critiques of misogynistic social cultures exposed the damage to women’s epistemic capacities and characters, as later critical race epistemologies did for the damaged epistemic characters of members of subordinated racial groups. If subjection to conditions of oppression damages the epistemic character of the oppressed, then it’s reasonable to expect engagement with that fact from vice epistemologists. Moreover, it’s also reasonable to expect them to have useful resources to offer to those who want to understand the character-epistemic dimensions of social oppression.

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A sensitivity to the connections between forms of social oppression and damaged or malformed epistemic character is certainly a feature of contemporary vice epistemology, for at least three reasons. To start with, a general interest in epistemic vices should naturally pay at least some attention to the question of how epistemic subjects come to acquire or develop those vices. Granted, such aetiological interest need not necessarily attend to the features of the social world focused upon by feminist and critical race theorists, such as intersectionally structured social identities, systems of social privilege, power hierarchies, and unjust social institutions and traditions. Some prefer to focus on the psychological bases of epistemic vices, or situational factors, or wider sociological, cultural, and ideological conditions that structure our development – and maldevelopment – as epistemic subjects (cf. Cassam 2019, Medina 2013). A second reason to expect vice epistemologists to attend to the connections between oppression and character is that many of them are working within feminist philosophical frameworks. Standout examples include the work of Miranda Fricker (2007) and José Medina (2012) on epistemic injustice, and the work of Alessandra Tanesini (2016, 2018) on the vices of humility: arrogance and superbia in the case of the privileged, and timidity and servility in the case of the oppressed. A final reason why vice epistemologists ought to attend to character and oppression is that most of them have at least latent ameliorative aspirations: one of the main reasons for systematically studying the epistemic vices is that epistemically vicious people and patterns of behaviour are sufficiently objectionable that it becomes imperative to find effective ways to reduce the incidence of vices. This is what Quassim Cassam recently called ‘the project of vice reduction’, whose main motivation is the sense that a world of unchecked epistemically vicious behaviour is just ‘too ghastly to contemplate’ (2019: 186, 187). A first step towards a vice epistemological analysis of the characterological damage to the members of groups subjected to forms of social oppression will be the development of a suitable concept to describe that phenomenon. A good clue comes from some remarks made by Fricker and Medina when describing the effects on people of sustained subjection to forms of epistemic injustice: Fricker says that subjection to gendered and racialised epistemic injustices tends to ‘inhibit’ or ‘thwart’ the development of subjectivity and character (2007: 49, 58). She also argues that internalisation of sexist and racist norms, values, and assumptions ‘corrupts’ the epistemic sensibilities and dispositions of both oppressors and the oppressed (2007: 93, 131, 138). Medina uses a similar language when characterising an epistemic vice as ‘a set of corrupted attitudes and dispositions’, and when arguing that as the period and intensity of a person’s subjection to conditions of oppression increase, so ‘their epistemic character [will] tend to become more corrupted’ (2012: 29, 72). Although neither Fricker nor Medina think of the members of oppressed groups as the passive victims of their environments, both find it natural to describe the damage done to epistemic character using the term ‘corruption’ – a term that gathers together other terms they use to describe such damage, such as ‘inhibit’,

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‘thwart’, and ‘erode’. Taking my cue from Fricker and Medina’s use of the term, my aim in this chapter is to offer a working analysis of the concept of epistemic corruption. I think this concept could play a useful role in our efforts to understand the connections between social oppression and epistemic character damage and therefore enhance the ameliorative potential of vice epistemology. But the concept also requires us to critically reconsider some of the conceptual and methodological commitments of vice epistemology. I therefore end the chapter by arguing that the concept of epistemic corruption can inspire the development of a distinctive sort of vice epistemology that – inspired by the work of Robin Dillon (2012) – I will label critical character epistemology.

4.2 The concept of epistemic corruption The term ‘corruption’ has enjoyed a long career as a means of articulating moral damage and other forms of degeneration experienced by people, whether as a result of external or social conditions, or internal factors such as failures of the will. Such rhetorics of corruption have often brought with them a vocabulary of vice. Gabriele Taylor remarks that, where the virtues heal and benefit oneself and others, ‘the vices corrupt and destroy’ (2006: 126), while Judith Shklar remarks that vices ‘dominate and corrupt’ our character (1984: 200), while Alasdair MacIntyre remarks that ‘the corruption of institutions is always in part at least an effect of the vices’ (2013: 227). Within the Western tradition, the moral uses of the term ‘corruption’ have generally referred to the loss or deterioration of the essential, typically positive qualities of a thing, and typically in ways that fundamentally compromise its integrity or constitution. Although it need not be coupled to characterological concepts, that is how I will use the term, albeit confined only to epistemic character, rather than moral and political corruption (on the latter, see Rothstein and Varraich 2017). I propose that epistemic corruption occurs when one’s epistemic character comes to be damaged due to one’s interaction with persons, conditions, processes, doctrines, or structures that facilitate the development and exercise of epistemic vices. Three comments on this initial definition. First, ‘damage’ can be understood in two ways: the deterioration of any pre-existing virtues and integrity already present in the subject’s character, or the failure of the subject to develop an epistemic character characterised by virtues and integrity. I label these active corruption and passive corruption, respectively, where the distinction is between damage done to qualities they currently possess and to their development. Second, we need to add some terminology: the corruptee is the person or thing being corrupted and the corruptors are the persons or things doing the corrupting. Sometimes, of course, they may be same thing, since some subjects are complicit in their epistemic self-corruption. And third, the term ‘facilitate’ is purposefully broad: depending on the context, it can mean ‘encourage’, ‘justify’, ‘legitimate’, ‘motivate’, ‘promote’, ‘provide conditions for’, and so on. We can roughly divide these into two main modes of facilitation: material conditions and motivational conditions.

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Since there are many ways to materially and motivationally facilitate the development and exercise of epistemic vices, our job as epistemologists is easier if we distinguish different modes of epistemic corruption. Without pretending to be comprehensive, consider the following five modes – with the provisos that others exist, and, in practice, that modes of corruption tend to merge into one another: 1 Acquisition: a corruptor can enable the acquisition of novel epistemic vices, ones not previously a feature of the subject’s epistemic character. Imagine a student with no natural dispositions or prior tendencies to arrogance who, under the influence of very charismatic but arrogant teachers within a school environment that rewards arrogant actions, comes to acquire the vice of arrogance. 2 Activation: a corruptor can activate dormant epistemic vices, ones typically latent or inactive in the subject’s epistemic character. Imagine a student with some underlying arrogant tendencies that are, as a matter of luck, always just ‘below the surface’, never showing themselves. Unfortunately, the student then has the bad luck to move to a school whose culture encourages inflated forms of self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, which activate their dormant arrogant dispositions. The next three ‘modes of corruption’ are different, insofar as they involve changes to vices already present and active in a subject’s character. 3 Propagation: a corruptor can increase the scope of a vice, the extent to which it affects the range of the subject’s character. Imagine a person whose vices only affect a certain set of activities or topics, such as someone dogmatic only about music, but not about politics, science, or anything else. Unfortunately, their initially localised dogmatism is amplified under the influence of their peer group, spreading to encompass more and more topics. Soon, they are dogmatic about all sorts of subjects, if not about all things, until that vice comes to ‘infect their whole character’, in Annette Baier’s (1995: 274) useful phrase. 4 Stabilisation: a corruptor can also increase the stability of a vice, reducing the chances of the vice’s susceptibility to disruption. Imagine an arrogant person prone to saying and doing arrogant things, but whose saving grace is also that they don’t always act arrogantly and typically cease when challenged. Their arrogance is unstable, since it fluxes on and off and is relatively easily acted upon by others. Unfortunately, the social conventions under which they operate come to be transformed in ways that tend to stabilise their vices – certain norms of censure break down, for instance, as the society slowly starts to become more tolerant of public displays of arrogance. The consequence is that the vice is gradually stabilised. Where it was once fluctuating, blinking ‘on’ and ‘off’, it has become stable and highly resistant to destabilisation. 5 Intensification: a corruptor can also increase the strength of a vice. Imagine a person with only a weak tendency to dogmatism: confronted with challenges

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to their beliefs, they are irksomely stubborn, but not aggressively resistant, and if asked to defend their views are prone to shrug and ‘let it go’. Unfortunately, they are internalising certain attitudes and assumptions as a result of their increasingly privileged social and professional identities. The consequence is that their once weak, incipient dogmatism slowly mutates into a raging dogmatic hubris of a strongly adversarial, agonistic form. These five modes of epistemic corruption should suffice to indicate some of the main ways a subject could become more epistemically vicious as a result of interactions with corruptors. The relevance and significance of the different modes will depend on specifics of specific epistemic subjects, the structure and psychology of the epistemic vices, and different socio-epistemic environments. To spell out some of these, let me note some presuppositions of this analysis of epistemic corruption.

4.3 Presuppositions and predicaments To start with the most obvious presupposition, subjects have epistemic characters, and these consist of a variety of epistemic dispositions or traits of fairly malleable scope, stability, and strength. These include dispositions to argue, evaluate, judge, perceive, reason, reflect, and understand in certain ways and, for most people, most of these dispositions will lack the stability and strength that are constitutive of virtues or vices. Our epistemic characters aren’t therefore exhausted by our virtues and vices. Most of us have perhaps a handful of virtues or vices and an array of more-or-less virtuous and vicious dispositions, which could be developed into the stable forms of virtue and vice – an ontology of character recently defended with due reference to empirical psychology by Christian Miller (2017). When an epistemic disposition or trait gains in strength, scope, and stability, then it becomes a virtue (if positively valenced) and a vice (if negatively valenced). A second presupposition – or set of presuppositions – is that a subject’s epistemic character is an active, ongoing product of an array of psychological, developmental, interpersonal, and structural-contextual factors. Much goes into the shaping of one’s epistemic character, and a main purpose of the concept of epistemic corruption is to help us identify the relevant sorts of factors: our psychological profiles, our patterns of social interactions, the diversity and the quality of our peers, the forms and dynamics of our social institutions, the variety of epistemic exemplars available as models of emulation, and the wider ramifying structures of power and privilege which intersect and interconnect all of these and more. But since this makes for a very complex picture, it’s helpful to draw on José Medina’s concept of an ‘epistemic predicament’. An epistemic predicament is the particular, contingent, and changing array of epistemic challenges, deficits, needs, obstacles, and threats that a subject experiences as a result of their positionality in the social world (2012: 28f, 34f). Writing of differently socially situated subjects, Medina emphasises that ‘their epistemic deficits are different, and their resources to overcome these deficits and to resist

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dominant ideologies are also different [as are the ways they] accrue epistemic gains and losses’ (2012: 28). Given all of this, one’s epistemic predicament profoundly influences the ways one can develop and deploy one’s epistemic agency. I think this includes one’s vulnerability to, and capacities to resist, epistemically corrupting conditions and processes. Medina separates the ‘predicaments of the privileged’ from the ‘predicaments of the oppressed’, although he also emphasises their internal variety and fluidity relative to one another. Those who occupy social positions of privilege are especially vulnerable to what he calls the ‘vices of the privileged’, such as arrogance, closedmindedness, and epistemic laziness, at least in certain of their forms (2012: §1.1). Although those vices are not confined to the privileged, nor are they an inevitable feature of the epistemic character of the privileged, they do lie in their path as obstacles which they ought to take special care to avoid. By contrast, members of socially oppressed groups are especially susceptible to developing such vices as servility and timidity, although these are neither confined to them, nor unanimous among the epistemic characters of the oppressed. A key feature of an epistemic predicament is that it shapes the specific range of epistemic vice to which one is especially susceptible and the range of resources one has for detecting and resisting epistemically corrupting influences and conditions. The epistemic predicaments of the oppressed may include the challenge of trying to devise effective strategies to protect and, if possible, to restore, their fragile testimonial credibility and epistemic confidence. The epistemic predicaments of the privileged may include the challenge of resisting the acute temptations to epistemically arrogant patterns of behaviour that come with a privileged social identity. My account of epistemic corruption also includes several presuppositions about the nature and activity of epistemically corrupting conditions. Such conditions vary along at least four axes. Their scope is the breadth of their influence within a given community, institution, or socio-epistemic environment and can be broader or narrower. Their strength is the power of their capacity to corrupt, where more strongly corrupting conditions are those more reliably capable of corrupting subjects. Their stability is the capacity of those conditions to maintain their corrupting power in the face of efforts to disrupt them or contingent changes in the wider environment. Their specificity is the range of vices the conditions can ‘corrupt for’, where we should distinguish specifically corrupting conditions that facilitate a specific range of vices – such as appetitive, rather than alethic, vices – and generically corrupting conditions which will tend to facilitate a whole range of vices. I’d speculate that epistemically monocultural environments can facilitate a whole range of epistemic vices, from arrogance and closed-mindedness to dogmatism and laziness to myopia and obliviousness. I also presuppose that epistemic corruption is a diachronic and dynamic process, one that unfolds over time and is dynamic in the double sense that it is active and consists of both corrupting and counter-corrupting tendencies – a ‘push and pull’. Epistemic corruption should not be thought of as a single, one-off instance of radical character damage, although perhaps certain dramatic or traumatic events

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could have this sort of destructive effect. In most cases, epistemic corruption takes the form of a complex, constant, cumulative series of interactions, experiences, and influences that is temporally extended and socially scaffolded, which is why studying it must use the resources of feminist and social epistemologies (Dillon 2012, Daukas 2019). The dynamic character of epistemic corruption also has a happy upshot. All but the most hostile epistemic environments contain at least some edifying aspects. We can imagine a radically epistemically corrupting environment, populated by forthright exemplars of epistemic vice and whose practices and structures are designed to systematically, materially, and motivationally facilitate epistemically vicious conduct – a nightmarish scenario. But such environments are extremely rare, and most actual epistemic environments are partially rather than radically corrupting. Even within small communities, such as a workplace, one can almost always find a variety of virtuous and vicious epistemic exemplars, for instance.

4.4 Epistemically corrupting conditions A fundamental aspiration of vice epistemology ought to be the improvement of the epistemic characters of epistemic subjects and, as a corollary, the provision of practicable methods for identifying and correcting epistemically corrupting conditions. Such work must be at once philosophically and empirically sophisticated, bringing together vice epistemology, sociology, and psychology as well as other allied disciplines, such as educational studies (cf. Kidd 2019b). I content myself with sketching out some examples of generically epistemically corrupting conditions. Their purpose is both to help fill out the idea of epistemic corruption and, more importantly, to help make the case for the development of the distinctive form of critical character epistemology to which the subsequent sections are devoted. 1 The absence of exemplars of virtue: a community may lack any positive exemplars who model epistemic virtue. Those within the environment therefore lack admirable and emulable exemplars of epistemic virtue, who can practically exemplify the virtues and/or provide theoretical elaboration of virtues, to speak in the terms of the exemplarist character theory developed by Linda Zagzebski (2017). Such absence does not, of course, automatically put people on a path to vice, but it does close off at least one important path to virtue (Croce and Vaccarezza 2017). 2 The derogation of exemplars of virtue: a community has exemplars of virtue, but they could be subject to derogation by other members of that community – sneered at, or mocked, or derided either openly or in private. Imagine a philosophy department where the ‘tender-hearted’ professors who are fairminded and temperate in debates are mocked for being ‘soft’ or for lacking the aggressively adversarial spirit allegedly constitutive of properly impressive philosophising – a pattern of derogation criticised by feminist argumentation theorists (Rooney 2010).

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3 The valorisation of vicious conduct and exemplars: some or all of the members of a community may celebrate exemplars of epistemic vice and also promote, celebrate, and reward epistemically vicious behaviour. Seeing that social and professional goods such as respect, esteem, praise, and recognition reliably accrue to vicious exemplars can provide incentive to epistemic viciousness. Moreover, the public celebration and advancement of the epistemically vicious sends clear messages about the possibilities available, if one cultivates those vices in one’s own life. 4 The ‘rebranding’ of vices as virtues: some people will become aware of the ways that corrupting conditions are starting to affect their epistemic character for the worse and they might try to take countermeasures. An obvious way to respond to those countermeasures is to try to disguise or conceal the fact of their being corrupted, and one way is to ‘rebrand’ vices as virtues (cf. Dillon 2012: 99). Think of how arrogance can become confidence, or dogmatism can become tenacity. If successful, this conceals the fact of corruption and so enables it to continue unhindered, at least until the concealment can be revealed. An outstanding analyst of such rebranding is the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, whose Reflections: Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims of 1664 opens with the maxim, ‘Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised’ – a reflection of an early modern European culture of cynicism about virtue, explored in Michael Moriarty’s interesting book, Disguised Vices (2011), especially chapter 12. 5 The establishment of conditions that increase the exercise costs of virtue: virtues will typically incur exercise costs, whether practical, psychological, social, or epistemic. An effective way to discourage the cultivation or exercise of virtue is to increase the costs incurred by its exercise. Think of typical costs for exercising the virtue of honesty: upsetting friends, embarrassing the powerful, angering those who wanted things kept hidden, sacrificing opportunities whose availability was contingent on one’s failure to honestly reveal their existence to others, and so on. By increasing exercise costs for epistemic virtues, the path to vice becomes easier and more attractive. Again, increasing exercise costs does not automatically make a person vicious, but does alter their capacity to explore the space of character-epistemic developmental possibilities in the direction of the virtues of the mind. 6 The establishment of structures that encourage the exercise of vice: these refer to ways of materially and motivationally facilitating epistemic viciousness. Imagine a doctor working for a tobacco company, which incentivises acts of dishonesty by financially rewarding the publication of journal and newspaper articles that insincerely question the connections between smoking and various diseases – this being one of many forms of epistemically corrupting conditions created by the tobacco industry, as documented by historians and sociologists of science, including Robert Proctor, who refers to it as ‘an unparalleled corruption of science’ (2011: 561). 7 The establishment of policies whose enactment requires the exercise of vice: our social and institutional environments are often organised and directed by

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policies, which create and empower certain norms, practices, and forms of organisation. If enacting a policy in these ways requires the exercise of vices, then the policy will be corrupting in the material and motivational senses. Several critics have argued that certain higher educational policies in the United States and United Kingdom do this in the case of the appetitive and alethic vices, like epistemic insensibility (Battaly 2013, Cooper 2008). No doubt there are many other forms of corrupting conditions, as well as variations in the forms taken by the ones sketched above. There is also interesting work to do in tracing out in detail the correlations between modes of corruption, corrupting conditions, and specific vices. There is also more to say, of course, about the psychology of epistemic corruption, the ways that the structure of different vices relates to different modes of corruption, and so on. Such details are best provided in conjunction with specific concrete case studies, for which at the moment the best sources are analyses of epistemic corruption in education (see Kidd 2015 and 2019b). For now, I hope these examples suffice to give a fuller picture of the nature and sources of epistemic corruption. I want to ask how this awareness of the phenomenon of epistemic corruption may require changes to the ways we conceive of epistemic vices and also how we practice vice epistemology.

4.5 Critical character epistemology The phenomenon of epistemic corruption clearly relates to a variety of issues and themes of vice epistemology – most obviously, to aetiological questions about the ways that subjects come to have epistemic vices, ameliorative questions about the possibility of and practices for vice reduction, and explanatory questions about the relationship between vice-based and other ways of explaining problematic epistemic behaviour (structural and situational, say). It seems clear that theorising epistemic corruption requires a constant, direct sensitivity to agent–environment interactions and the ways that epistemic character and agency are deeply shaped by the norms, practices, structures, and power systems of social environments. I want to argue that taking seriously epistemic corruption, as a pervasive feature of our socio-epistemic environments and a major factor in the development of epistemic character, needs a style of vice epistemology with certain distinctive conceptual and methodological commitments. I call this a critical character epistemology, taking as its model and inspiration the critical character theory developed by Robin Dillon. It aims ‘to understand moral character as affected by domination and subordination and by the struggles both to maintain and to resist and overthrow them’ (2012: 84). It challenges traditional forms of philosophical character theory for their double neglect of the socio-political dimensions of character and the negative side of character, primarily vice and oppression (and, I would add, corruption). Dillon emphasises several other features, three of which stand out for my purposes. First, critical character theory conceives of individuals as situated within

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social practices and institutions that are organised and animated by systems of power and shape, what Medina calls their ‘epistemic predicaments’. Second, its conceptual pluralism: an active sensitivity to the complex interconnections among the core organising concepts of ethical theory, rather than taking one – such as character, action, or intention – as fundamental. Third, critical character theory shares with critical theory the deep aspiration ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’ (Horkheimer 1982: 244). But where critical theory tends to focus on material, social, and political dimensions of oppression, for Dillon, critical character theory ‘springs from the recognition that enslavement is not only social and material but also operates on and through character’ (2012: 85). A critical character epistemology aims to deploy Dillon’s insights with an eye on those specifically epistemic characterological dimensions of oppression, as articulated using the concept of epistemic corruption. Analyses of the damage done to the epistemic characters of oppressed subjects can only be fully achieved with a vice epistemology characterised by the sort of socialised, pluralistic, and liberatory stance built into critical character theory by Dillon. I therefore want to sketch out some options for a suitably revised form of critical character epistemology. I focus on three features, which I label aetiological sensitivity, axiological pluralism, and normative contextualism. Of these, the last will likely prove the most contentious. 4.5.1 Aetiological sensitivity A concern with epistemically vicious characters should naturally invite an interest in the processes or conditions that contribute to the formation and retention of epistemic vices. Much of this interest is currently reflected in debates about agential responsibility for epistemic vices, such as the distinctions between acquisition-responsibility and retention-responsibility (Cassam 2019: ch.6) and between responsibilist and personalist forms of vice (Battaly 2016). But these are specific uses of what I have elsewhere called aetiological sensitivity (Kidd 2016). It names a commitment to actively attend to the complex, contingent conditions under which the epistemic characters of subjects develop (the Greek, aitía, means ‘cause’, and in medicine, ‘aetiology’ refers to both the causation or origination of a disease and its study). Aetiological sensitivity is a methodological commitment that urges the theorist to combine description of the current state of epistemic character with attentiveness to its developmental history. To describe someone as vicious is to describe the state of their character. To describe them as corrupted is to say something about how they got into that state. It’s for this reason that a critical character epistemologist will usually prefer to refer to corrupted characters, rather than vicious characters. (Compare describing someone as a radical with describing them as having been radicalised – the latter term, of course, is used in terrorism studies, a discipline whose use of aetiological explanations has been critically discussed by Cassam 2018.)

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Since epistemic character can be shaped by psychological, developmental, interpersonal, structural, and historical factors, there are many sorts of factors to which one may need to be aetiologically sensitive. Our characters are shaped by our attitudes, cognitive styles, and temperaments; by the particular sequencing and patterns of events and experiences we undergo during our lives; by the diversity and characteristics of the subjects with whom we can or must interact, including the particular ways they respond to our developing epistemic characters; and by our emplacement within systems of social practices and institutions that organise the epistemic possibilities that are available and made salient for the members of different groups; by the wider cultural and ideological contexts within which play out emerging and entrenched structures of power, such as the inherited, selfsustaining systems of ‘white ignorance’ described by Charles Mills (2007). Luckily, aetiological sensitivity does not require appeal to these multifactorial explanations of epistemic corruption in every case. Sometimes narrower forms of explanation will do the job (cf. Cassam 2019: 27). Sometimes, though, our analyses of epistemic corruption must go ‘all the way back’, into the contingencies of history, and ‘all the way down’, to the underlying social structures or theoretical visions shaping conceptions of our epistemic predicament. Explanatory adequacy depends on one’s explanatory aims. Medina, for instance, typically prefers to tell socially and historically complex stories about the ‘sociogenesis’ of epistemic character traits – the idea that ‘epistemic virtues and vices [have] distinctive lines of social development’ – because he wants to explore the connections between epistemic corruption and sexist and racist structures and cultures (2012: 30). There are two sorts of vice epistemology that typically show sensitivity to the aetiology of epistemic vices and to the phenomenon of epistemic corruption. The first is work in character epistemologies of education, much of which is concerned with the possibility that educational practices and systems can be epistemically corrupting (Battaly 2013, Johnson 2020, Kidd 2019). If an educator worries about the vices of their students, then they should identify the sources of those vices, especially if their own teaching practices maybe among them. A better understanding of the aetiology of vice can help us better educate for virtuous epistemic character. We also find aetiological sensitivity in liberatory vice epistemologies, such as Medina’s and Tanesini’s accounts of the epistemically corrupting effects of systems of subordination and domination, for the privileged and the marginalised, alike. Aetiology here plays a double role. It serves the ameliorative aspiration of liberating people from oppression, since dismantling corrupting conditions is an aim of that project. It also helps to encourage a properly pluralistic stance on our evaluations of, and responses to, epistemically vicious subjects. Consider evaluative responses to vice. Cassam argues that epistemic vices are always proper objects of criticism, since vices are failings independent of their aetiology. The other typical evaluative response to viciousness is blame, on which virtue and vice theorists have tended disproportionately to focus. But this is doubly problematic. First, certain forms of blaming are part of a standard strategy of oppression, which aims to obscure the unjust structures that corruptively generate those vices and failings – a sensitivity informing what Dillon calls ‘the politics of

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character appraisal’ (2012: 100; cf. Medina 2012: ch.4). Second, a myopic focus on blaming occludes other responses to corrupted subjects, like anger, disappointment, regret, and sadness. Their appropriateness is often determined by aetiological considerations: if your vices are the product of sustained subjection to acutely corrupting conditions from which escape was impossible, then the appropriate responses may be anger at those conditions and sadness at the damage done to your character (cf. Cassam 2019: 21–22). Aetiological sensitivity also encourages a more pluralistic sense of our practical responses to epistemically vicious characters. By tracing the conditions that corrupt our characters, one can better identify what one can do to reduce the incidence and intensity of vices. Corrective practical strategies can be individual (self-discipline, edifying instruction) or structural (social activism, educational reform). Sometimes, one should act at both levels, bearing in mind the fuzziness of the agents/structures distinction and Dillon’s guiding vision of character as ‘fluid, dynamic, and contextualised’, and ‘processive rather than substantive’ (2012: 105). Crucially, our decisions about the appropriateness of different strategies should be informed by the aetiology of the vicious character of different subjects. Employing individual strategies for vices that are products of epistemically corrupting structures means we are tricked into playing a febrile form of ameliorative whack-a-mole, rather than really transforming the surrounding structures. Developing those practical possibilities into the future will, of course, be closely tied to questions about the nature of aetiological explanations: are they more akin to mechanical explanations, aimed at identifying relevant underlying processes, or more like an autobiographical description of the particular course of one’s development into the person one becomes? Aetiologically sensitive analyses of epistemic vices motivate the conviction that responses to corrupted agents should therefore be evaluatively and practically pluralistic. When confronted with corrupted subjects with vicious characters, our evaluative responses can include anger, blame, disappointment, frustration, regret, and sadness; moreover, these are often messily bound up with one another in affectively and interpersonally complex ways. A consequence of this for critical character epistemology is that a default suspicion of blaming, which a critical character epistemologist will regard as one response among others. Blaming is often counterproductive, unjust, and liable to perpetuate patterns of oppression. Dillon puts the point well in her advice that when confronted with corrupted subjects, the point is not to blame but ‘to determine what to do, with or for whom, and how’ (2012: 92). 4.5.2 Axiological pluralism Axiological pluralism is the conviction that a proper appraisal of the badness of vices cannot always be achieved if it appeals only to epistemic values. Most analyses of epistemic vices are axiologically monistic insofar as they appeal to one type of value, namely, epistemic value. Consider the main conceptions of epistemic vice. Consequentialist analyses construe vices as tending systematically to create

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a preponderance of bad epistemic effects, or failing to cause a preponderance of good epistemic effects for the bearer, other agents, or the environment (according to Cassam’s obstructivism, for instance, epistemic vices are traits that obstruct the gaining, keeping, and sharing of knowledge). Motivational analyses construe vices as either expressing bad epistemic motives, such as indifference to truth or a desire to thwart the epistemic agency of others, or as marking the absence of good epistemic motives and values, such as what Linda Zagzebski argued is the fundamental motivation for all epistemic virtues, the desire for ‘cognitive contact with reality’ (1996: 167). On both conceptions, the badness of epistemic vices is defined in relation to epistemic values, whether a lack of love of truth, or of desire to acquire knowledge, or a lack of aspiration to ‘cognitive contact with reality’. Granted, none of these deny that epistemically vicious conduct is also bad nonepistemically, too. But consideration of the non-epistemic tends to be a secondary aspect of their analyses. I think analyses of epistemic corruption motivate a rejection of axiological monism. Appraisals of epistemic corruption require axiological pluralism. In a weaker form, pluralism says that appraisal of the badness of at least some epistemic vices requires appeal to epistemic and non-epistemic, ethical, socio-political values. Explaining the wrongs of vicious testimonial injustice requires inclusion of the moral wrongs, social harms, and political injustices caused by unfair deflations of agential testimonial credibility (see Congdon 2017; Pohlhaus, Jr. 2014). It would, at the very least, be odd to attempt any fully satisfying explanation of the wrongs of testimonial injustice that didn’t reference its integrated moral, social, and political dimensions (Fricker 2007: 44, 54). In its stronger forms, axiological pluralism says that appraisal of the badness of at least some epistemic vices requires a rejection of the epistemic/non-epistemic distinction. Nancy Daukas, for instance, speaks of ‘ethico-epistemic’ traits and dispositions (2019: 381) while Fricker speaks of ‘hybrid’ ethico-epistemic virtues (2007: §5.2). This more radical pluralism maintains that the epistemic, ethical, social, and political dimensions of life are too indissolubly bound up with one another to be even notionally separated. Indeed, the very attempt to separate them may invite suspicion, given Kristie Dotson’s (2012) lucid warning that doing so can serve to conceal and so perpetuate certain aspects of social oppression. If the epistemic is political, then studies of corruption need a richer axiology. 4.5.3 Normative contextualism The third feature of a critical character epistemology, perhaps also the most contentious, is normative contextualism: the conviction that the normative status of some or all epistemic character traits is dependent on the epistemic predicament of a given epistemic subject. This plays on Dillon’s critical challenges to conventional classifications of traits as virtues or vices: certain traits traditionally classified as virtues may be vices for the oppressed, and likewise in the case of ‘vices’ which could be ‘reclaimed’ as ‘liberatory virtues’ (2012: 98). The conclusion of the critical character theorist is that the valence, appropriateness, and possibility

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of certain epistemic character traits is contextually sensitive. We should not prejudge the normative status of traits – as vicious or virtuous – since much depends on the socially situated epistemic predicament of the subject in question. Normative contextualism can take a variety of forms, with the weaker thesis being that at least some epistemic character traits have a default normative status, that can be distorted under certain epistemically hostile conditions. Consider Heather Battaly’s account of the trait of closedmindedness, characterised as an unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant epistemic options. She argues that, under epistemically hostile conditions, this trait is an effects-virtue, since its exercise would tend systematically to help one retain true beliefs, avert epistemic opportunity costs, and pursue one’s own epistemic projects (Battaly 2018a, 2018b: §4). It may at least be a ‘burdened’ epistemic virtue, in Lisa Tessman’s sense of ‘traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression, while in other ways they detract from their bearer’s well-being’ (2005: 95). The stronger form of normative contextualism denies that epistemic character traits have even a default normative status. Independently of a specific epistemic predicament, there are no grounds for normative evaluation of a trait as virtuous or as vicious. A critic might protest that at least some traits must have a default normative status, perhaps high-fidelity vices such as cruelty or epistemic malevolence. But the critical character epistemologist regards this as an empirical claim, vulnerable to the provision of concrete cases where those traits serve the epistemic and other interests of oppressed subjects. Perhaps the most overt advocate of a strong form of normative contextualism is Dillon, who argues that ‘character and character assessment may be deeply context dependent’ (2012: 100): [According to a critical character theory] character dispositions would be understood to be inculcated, nurtured, directed, shaped, and given significance and moral valence as vice or virtue in certain ways in certain kinds of people by social interactions and social institutions and traditions that situate people differentially in power hierarchies; and we would understand vices in and among individuals as, among other things, dispositions that support, direct, shape, and give significance and value to social interactions and institutions. (2012: 104) The trick, of course, will be to develop accounts of epistemic character traits and dispositions that are properly neutral, in the sense of not prejudging their normative status. Daukas gives the example of Roberts and Wood’s account of the vice of vanity as an ‘excessive concern to be well-regarded by other people and thus a hypersensitivity to the view that others take of oneself’ (2007: 259). She argues that the trait of vanity functions as a virtue of the members of oppressed groups, for whom intense concern about others’ perception of them ‘expresses a realistic caution, a pragmatically necessary vigilance in self-monitoring’ (2019: 381). A critic will object that since vanity was characterised in terms of ‘excessive’ concern and sensitivity, it is vicious by definition. But the critical character

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epistemologist responds that Roberts and Wood’s original definition was imperfect, since it failed to honour trait-neutrality. Perhaps it is better to define the trait of vanity as the disposition to actively and deliberately configure one’s selfpresentation to try to ensure one is perceived and evaluated positively by others. Characterising the trait in this way is hopefully neutral, since that disposition could take on virtuous or vicious forms, depending, for instance, on the sorts of motives or effects with which it can become associated. A critical character epistemologist proposes that we start by conceiving of epistemic character traits as normatively neutral, only assigning them the status of virtue or vice once we have considered carefully the range of values judged to be proper to epistemic character evaluation and the epistemic predicaments of different socially situated subjects. What we might end up with is a more complex picture of a variety of epistemic character traits whose normative status is much more contingent than is tolerable for traditional character theory.

4.6 Conclusions I have offered a working analysis of the phenomenon of epistemic corruption and argued it should play a more central role within vice epistemology. An epistemically corrupted subject has experienced certain forms of characterological damage due to interactions with features and members of the social world that facilitate the development and exercise of vices. There are several modes of epistemic corruption and complex stories to tell about the ways that a subject experiences and resists the epistemically corrupting effects of their environment. We also find strong precedent for analyses of epistemic corruption in contemporary and historic vice epistemological projects, including precursor work in early modern English feminist vice epistemology and more recent critical race-theoretic character epistemologies, such as those of W.E.B. Du Bois (see Kidd 2018: §2A). I also proposed that studying epistemic corruption as a mode of oppression requires a critical character epistemology. It ought to be aetiologically sensitive to the complexity and contingency of the conditions that shape epistemic character, axiologically pluralistic in the range of values used in appraisals of epistemic character traits, and normatively contextualist about the status of character traits for differently socially situated predicaments of different agents. Finally, critical character epistemology is ultimately liberatory in its aspirations. It aims to identify and dismantle epistemically corrupting conditions and to find ways to repair damaged epistemic characters. It is unclear how different a critical character epistemology would be from the current forms of vice epistemology. I suspect the real points of difference will be axiological pluralism and normative contextualism, especially in their stronger forms, but, hopefully, time will tell.

Acknowledgements I am grateful for many constructive discussions with the Vice Squad and for the comments and encouragement of Alice Monypenny, Taylor Tate, and audiences

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at the Universities of Connecticut, Durham, Nottingham, and Sheffield. The ideas in this paper are also obviously deeply indebted to Robin Dillon’s work.

References Baier, A. (1995) Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Battaly, H. (2013) “Detecting Epistemic Vice in Higher Education Policy: Epistemic Insensibility in the Seven Solutions and the REF,” The Journal of Philosophy of Education 47 (2): 263–280. Battaly, H. (2016) “Epistemic Virtue and Vice: Reliabilism, Responsibilism, and Personalism,” in C. Mi, M. Slote, and E. Sosa (eds.), Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Chinese and Western Philosophy: The Turn Towards Virtue (New York: Routledge), 99–120. Battaly, H. (2018a) “Closed-Mindedness and Dogmatism,” Episteme 15 (3): 261–282. Battaly, H. (2018b) “Can Closed-Mindedness be an Intellectual Virtue?” in S. Barker, C. Crerar, and T. Goetze (eds.), Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84: 23–45. Card, C. (1996) The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Cassam, Q. (2012) “Vice Epistemology,” The Monist 99 (3): 159–180. Cassam, Q. (2018) “The Epistemology of Terrorism and Radicalisation,” in S. Barker, C. Crerar, and T. Goetze (eds.), Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84: 187–209. Cassam, Q. (2019) Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Congdon, M. (2017) “What’s Wrong with Epistemic Injustice? Harm, Vice, Objectification, Misrecognition,” in I.J. Kidd, G. Pohlhaus, Jr. and J. Medina (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (New York: Routledge), 243–253. Cooper, D.E. (2008) “Teaching and Truthfulness,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 27: 79–87. Croce, M. and M.S. Vaccarezza. (2017) “Educating Through Exemplars: Alternative Paths to Virtue,” Theory and Research in Education 15 (1): 5–19. Daukas, N. (2019) “Feminist Virtue Epistemology,” in H. Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (New York: Routledge), 379–391. Dillon, R. (2012) “Critical Character Theory: Toward a Feminist Perspective on ‘Vice’ (and ‘Virtue’),” in S.L. Crasnow and A.M. Superson (eds.), Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press), 83–114. Dotson, K. (2012) “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33 (1): 24–47. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Horkheimer, M. (1982) Critical Theory (New York: Seabury Press). Johnson, C. (2020) “Teaching to the Test: How Schools Discourage Phronesis,” in I.J. Kidd, Q. Cassam, and H. Battaly (eds.), Vice Epistemology (New York: Routledge). Kidd, I.J. (2015) “Educating for Intellectual Humility,” in Jason Baehr (ed.), Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2015), 54–70.

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Kidd, I.J. (2016) “Charging Others with Epistemic Vice,” The Monist, 99 (3): 181–197. Kidd, I.J. (2019a) “Deep Epistemic Vices,” Journal of Philosophical Research 43: 43–67. Kidd, I.J. (2019b) “Epistemic Corruption and Education,” Episteme 16 (2): 220–235. Macintyre, A. (2013) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury). Medina, J. (2012) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Miller, C. (2017) The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Mills, C. (2007) “White Ignorance,” in S. Sullivan and N. Tuana, (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (New York: SUNY Press), 11–38. Moriarty, M. (2011) Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pohlhaus, Jr., G. (2014) “Discerning the Primary Epistemic Harm in Cases of Testimonial Injustice,” Social Epistemology 28 (2): 99–114. Proctor, R.N. (2011) Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley: University of California Press). Roberts, R.C. and W.J. Wood. (2007) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rochefoucauld, F, de La. (2008) Collected Maxims and Other Reflections [1664], trans E.H. Blackmore, A.M. Blackmore, and F. Giguère (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rooney, P. (2010) “Philosophy, Adversarial Argumentation, and Embattled Reason,” Informal Logic 30 (3): 203–234. Rothstein, B. and A. Varraich. (2017) Making Sense of Corruption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shklar, J. (1984) Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Tanesini, A. (2016) “Calm Down, Dear: Intellectual Arrogance, Silencing and Ignorance,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90 (1): 71–92. Tanesini, A. (2018) “Intellectual Servility and Timidity,” Journal of Philosophical Research 43: 21–41. Taylor, G. (2006) Deadly Vices (Oxford: Clarendon). Tessman, L. (2005) Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press). Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Zagzebski, L. (2017) Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Part II

Collectives, institutions, and networks

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Institutional epistemic vices The case of inferential inertia Miranda Fricker

One of the achievements of virtue epistemology has been the identification of an array of epistemic virtues that had not previously been distinguished or focused on in traditional epistemology.1 Similarly, it is an ongoing achievement of what Quassim Cassam has called ‘vice epistemology’ to explore the underbelly of the same domain—the epistemic vices that either mirror or in less direct ways reflect the constellation of virtues. There is also room for a certain hybridity across the two main domains in which the notions of virtue and vice find application—the epistemic and the ethical. In earlier work I tried to bring attention to two virtues that are hybrid in that they are both epistemic and ethical in kind, since they aim equally at the ultimate ends of truth and justice. These were ‘testimonial justice’ and ‘hermeneutical justice’ (Fricker 2007), both virtues of epistemic justice, and I subsequently tried to show how these virtues might manifest themselves not only as individual virtues but alternatively as institutional virtues, gatekeeping certain kinds of political power (Fricker 2010 & 2013).2 José Medina has explored further virtues and vices in the domain of epistemic injustice—virtues such as humility, curiosity/diligence, and open-mindedness; vices such as epistemic laziness, arrogance, and closed-mindedness (Medina 2013)—and, I take it, all such virtues and vices will be hybrids inasmuch as the wrongs that they pre-empt or that flow from them respectively are at once ethical and epistemic in kind. Just as there can be hybrid ethical-epistemic virtues, then, so there can be hybrid ethical-epistemic vices. Why might we care about the question of whether institutions can be said to have vices of any kind? Why not content ourselves with using a vocabulary of, say, efficiency and inefficiency, functionality and dysfunctionality, relative to the institution’s goals or purposes? Surely we are able to critically assess these things, and the relative merits of the institutional goals and purposes too, without having to talk specifically in terms of virtue and vice? These are terms which after all strike many as having alienating overtones of high church or, alternatively, high classicism, depending on whether they ring moralistic or simply archaic. This is a fair question, but on the other hand, let’s not forget that (to fleetingly sloganize) meaning is use—or at any rate these concepts and their overtones are not static, unless and until we stop using them. There might be good reasons to rehabilitate and normalize the notions of virtue and vice, even for institutions, so

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that unwanted overtones are silenced and ideas of virtues and vices come, more completely, to seem like a proper part of our contemporary normative equipment for ethical evaluation. Indeed this is one way of picturing what much of our recent theorizing about virtue and vice is gradually working to achieve. More specifically, an important reason to engage in the ongoing modernization of these concepts is that something approximating the idea of institutional vice has for some time had a tentative foothold in public discourse, but one we perhaps do not yet conceive very clearly either in the public domain or in philosophy. The idea of institutional vice, or virtue for that matter, has even now received relatively little philosophical attention compared with individual virtue and vice, so perhaps there is some useful work to be done on this score.3 A central role for the idea of institutional vice came sharply to the fore in British culture in 1999 with the publication of the Macpherson Report on the handling of the racially motivated murder six years earlier of a teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in South East London (Macpherson 1999). That report described the London Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’, and this marked a watershed moment of public acknowledgement of the deep permeation of racism in a central and powerful institution such as the capital’s police force.4 If anything is a vice in an institution then racism is, and I therefore consider the idea of a police force being found to be institutionally racist as furnishing us with a central and prominent example of something that can be properly theorized as institutional vice. While I would not pretend that the idiom of institutional vice is the only one in which we could make good sense of the various phenomena of institutional racism (we could, for instance, restrict ourselves to talk of institutional prejudice, inequality, bias, dysfunctionality, failure of protocol …) still I would argue that there is a robust purpose for which the vocabulary of institutional virtue and vice is distinctively well-placed to serve. That purpose is basically one of picking out aspects of institutions that are the collective analogue of an individual agent’s character, but where the actual individuals whose combined epistemic agency comprises the institution’s epistemic agency need not, as individuals, have any of the traits or attitudes of the institution. While some institutional vices will depend upon some significant number of the individual officers having the vice themselves, at least when in role as an officer of that institution, other vices will be more structural in kind, and the notion of institutional vice is well-designed to be applied to both sorts of case. Or so I aim to show.

5.1 Ethos matters What is distinctive about the idea of an analogue to an individual’s character? Why put oneself to all the philosophical trouble of substantiating the idea of institutional character? Even if it is philosophically do-able, do we really need it? The answer lies in how far we value the possibility that (at least some of) our institutions have an ethos from which their procedures and judgements flow.5 Only through sustaining an ethos that guides and explains their conduct might an institution—the NHS, parliament, the police force, the BBC, the care system,

Institutional epistemic vices 91 the judiciary—genuinely stand for something, and constitute part of the fabric of what we believe or hope is good about the culture of which they are a part. Most saliently perhaps, in a democracy it may be important to us as citizens that the judicial system operate not only in a way that is well-designed to deliver right results—fair sentencing in the criminal courts, for instance—but moreover that the institutional mechanisms and procedures that furnish these right results are fuelled by appropriate values. Were the right results (the fair sentencing) produced by a miracle of clever incentivization and efficiency mechanisms, this would not be enough. While there is a place for incentivization and efficiency mechanisms in any institution—performance reviews, prospects of promotion, disbarring and dismissal for anyone found to be corrupt, and so on—the point remains that no institution can produce justice proper except by way of reasons of justice (Fricker 2013). In the institutional setting this can only be a matter of the value commitments being embodied in the processes, including the epistemic processes involved in fact-finding and adjudicating, by way of an appropriate ethos. Ethos, at least as I am using the notion, looks to be the only way that institutional bodies can incorporate intrinsic values in their agency as institutions. It is comprised of collective motivational dispositions and evaluative attitudes within the institutional body, of which the various good or bad ends orientate the institution’s activities. A different aspect of the explanation why we regard an appropriate ethos, and not merely appropriate outcomes, as important for at least some of our institutions is that a chief way of convincing people that a given outcome is appropriate—fair, or just, or a correct application of the rules—is to show them the appropriate value commitments that were in fact brought to bear in the process that produced it. A good deal of our confidence in institutional judgements and actions flows from our degree of confidence in its value commitments—epistemic values such as actually caring about the truth and the gathering of proper evidence, as opposed to just securing a conviction, for instance. That is why transparency in many of these processes is a good thing—we get to see the ethos of the institution laid more or less bare in the record (video of interviews, Hansard, minutes of meetings, etc.). If, for example, a local government body entrusted with certain town planning decisions in an area of redevelopment fails to consult long-term local residents, or consults only private residents and ignores council housing residents, then we might well describe that institutional body as ‘high-handed’, ‘arrogant’, perhaps ‘cynical’, not only ethically but intellectually—from the point of view of data gathering and achieving a proper perspective for judgement. In itself the outcome judgement (a new supermarket and fitness centre in place of the beloved but littleused Victorian municipal swimming pool) might be found by all to be the right result all things considered, yet still if residents are signally unimpressed with the values implicit in the way the authorities came to the planning decision, then this will tend to cast doubt on the quality of the outcome judgement itself. Institutional ethos matters, then, partly because the presence or absence of appropriate value priorities behind any given item or process of institutional epistemic conduct is a factor in determining confidence and satisfaction levels in the outcome judgement

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itself. Just as value-dispositions matter in our evaluations of individual agents, then, in many of our evaluations of institutional agency, ethos matters. Insofar as this is a key rationale for modernizing the ideas of virtue and vice with a view to rendering them fully applicable to contemporary institutions, it is worth noticing that it entails a commitment to a broadly (though not exclusively) motivational or disposition-based conception of virtue/vice. Were one to adopt instead a purely skill-based conception that makes no mention of the agent’s motivational states and dispositions, then there would be no distinctive purpose for virtue and vice talk in relation to institutions. We might just as well stick with the familiar, thinly performance-oriented terms of assessment, evaluating institutional epistemic agency in relation to informational accuracy, size of data sets, evidential thoroughness, breadth of fact-finding, soundness of predictions, and other aspects of epistemic performance construed in a way that does not draw on ethos. So the general question, ‘What is distinctive about the idiom of virtue and vice when it comes to evaluating institutional conduct?’, has furnished an answer that makes a purely skill-based conception otiose. I shall therefore pursue my line of thought about institutional vice on the basis that epistemic virtues involve good epistemic dispositions and attitudes as well as reliability in achieving good epistemic ends. This means I will be using a broadly responsibilist conception as opposed to a reliabilist conception (Axtell 2000; Battaly 2010).6 In saying we care, and should care, about an institution’s ethos, I have so far put the point only positively: we want justice proper, and so we want the judiciary to produce just outcomes from an appropriately stable commitment to the value of justice—an ethos of justice. However, as soon as one puts the point positively in this way, the negative counterpart quickly comes to mind: the idea of institutional ethos is equally important because we need to be able to think about our institutions critically, in terms of their faults, whether stable and systematic, or fleeting and one-off. Like individual agents, institutional bodies can obviously have fleeting lapses of judgement that might even be described as ‘out of character’. That is why it is always such an important question to ask of an apparently one-off lapse whether it is indeed fleeting and out of character or whether in fact, beneath the surface, there has been a deterioration of ethos more widely in a branch of the organization. This question was in the air, for example, when on the 9th February 2018 it was revealed by The Times that ‘Top Oxfam staff paid Haiti survivors for sex’, after which a crucial question was whether similar abuses had been committed by other Oxfam aid workers, and whether Oxfam had in any way covered up allegations or important details of the case. Assessing how far a given lapse is a one-off event or an expression of a more systemic decline in institutional ethos is an important question, partly because it determines whether or not a general loss of faith in the organization is a warranted response, and because of the implications for what it will take to fix the organization. We need, then, to be able to make reference to institutional ethos when engaging in evaluative judgements about institutions’ practical and epistemic functioning. And this means we have an interest in understanding what social-metaphysical

Institutional epistemic vices 93 commitments are entailed by such talk. What, then, is the structure of an institutional ethos?

5.2 Modelling ethos I am proposing the idea of an ethos as the institutional analogue of an individual’s character in the virtue-theoretic sense—a set of interrelated dispositions and attitudes, where (in the case of a virtuous person) these are conceived as temporally and counter-factually stable motives towards good ultimate and mediate ends. This will be the same whether we are considering ethical or intellectual character, though the good end(s) are fewer in the case of the intellectual. (Value monists would say truth is the only ultimate end of epistemic virtue, so that different epistemic virtues are exclusively individuated by reference to their differing mediate ends; pluralists, by contrast, allow that an intellectual virtue might aim variously at truth or knowledge or understanding. Zagzebski (1996) helpfully glosses these by talking in terms of ‘cognitive contact with reality’.) In modelling the phenomenon of institutional ethos, there are two broad theoretical approaches available to us that are applied to various sorts of group phenomena, such as group intentionality, group belief, and so on: summative and collective. In general, it should not be thought of as a competition, for both models represent perfectly real possibilities, and indeed each kind of group is frequently realized in institutional life. For example, if an exam board were to move by way of majority vote to produce the judgement that a given candidate has satisfied the requirements for conferral of degree, the group and its decision is structured summatively. If a similar exam board in a neighbouring department moves by way of consensus towards what Margaret Gilbert calls a ‘joint commitment’ to the judgement that a given candidate has satisfied the requirements for conferral of degree, then the group is structured as a collective, and in the committed sense she calls a ‘plural subject’. In this latter case the group judges ‘as a body’, to use Gilbert’s evocative phrase (Gilbert 2000). This will involve the individual board members expressing willingness, under conditions of common knowledge (each knows that the others know …), to endorse or go along with the judgement.7 By contrast, the summative model of institutional ethos would cast institutions or institutional bodies within broader institutions (faculties within a university, or squads within a police force) as capable of having an ethos only as a matter of the aggregate of individual officers’ value commitments. These may or may not be adequately consistent to add up to a coherent ethos, and so for any such aggregation of individual values it will remain an open question whether they amass into a coherent ethos or not. But it is worth noting that a further possibility for institutional ethos is a mixed economy of collective and summative structures. If, for instance, members of the executive branch of an institution were to jointly commit to a certain set of values in their deliberations and judgements, while the implementation branches of the same organization were charged with simply implementing the policies (without any joint commitment, let us imagine, to the values from which they flowed), then there could easily be some significant

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mismatch between the jointly committed values of the executive and the values of the officers implementing them on the ground. They may or may not like it, but they do it regardless as part of their job because that’s the new policy they have been told to implement. Notably, in a case where the executive body is trying to bring about institutional change, we must positively expect such mismatch. This mixed economy picture presents us with a fairly typical top-down form of institutional change (or failure to change, depending on how it turns out), and one of the reasons why top-down change can ultimately fail is precisely because successful institutional change so often depends on the new ethos being genuinely taken up at the implementation level of the organization—the officers in the field, whether policing, or healthcare, or development work. While there is room for a mismatch between newly committed values in the executive and their mere implementation at the ground-level, then, in many situations (recall the case of Oxfam) if those values are not in fact stably held by the officers in the field, whether by dint of joint commitment or personal commitment, then there may be trouble ahead. Anyone looking to make good sense of institutional ethos will need to make room for non-summative possibilities, including the mixed economy model above. I have started with Gilbert’s view, and will argue that it offers the appropriate collectivist model for present purposes, but we should first acknowledge that there is a range of differing possibilities of a genuinely collectivist kind. The various options can all be helpfully conceived in relation to the degree of commitment to the shared intention/value/activity, as it may be. Michael Bratman’s view of collective intentionality requires no commitment as such, in the sense that the interdependent intentions of members of the group who each intend to play their part in a planned group activity, such as painting a house together, are strictly pro tem, so that someone who breaks away is not burdened by any residual commitment they are failing to honour (Bratman 1999, 2014). Christian List and Philip Pettit (2011) do not employ any stronger idea of commitment to group plan than we find in Bratman; indeed, they are explicit in using more or less his conception. Raimo Tuomela’s conception of ‘we-thinking’ does involve a certain commitment to the group endeavour, but he employs the notion of ‘ethos’ to capture the flavour of that commitment, and it does not seem to entail that a break-away member of a we-intending group would thereby be the proper object of rebuke (Tuomela 2013). If this broad contrast between Gilbert’s view and the others in the literature is correct, then Gilbert’s account emerges as distinctive in embedding a strong notion of commitment in the very mechanism of group agency—the formation of the plural subject. The joint commitment involved in the making of any collective judgement—for instance, the examining board’s judgement that the examinee has satisfied the requirements for conferral of degree—survives even the most complete lapse of intention, participation, or interest on the part of a given individual member of the group. For Gilbert, if a member reneges on a joint commitment, they are therein a proper object of rebuke or a demand for an explanation. One can become fully party to a joint commitment of this kind even if one personally disagrees with the content of the commitment, for one can go along with a given judgement that the candidate has satisfied the requirements for conferral of

Institutional epistemic vices 95 degree by merely ‘letting it stand’, even if, as a private individual, you would not make that judgement. Perhaps you take a dim view of one of their exam results, considering conflicting examiners’ marks to have been resolved in the wrong direction, but because your colleagues on the board take a different view, you have decided to acquiesce and allow a consensus. Going along with a judgement by ‘letting it stand’ in this way is sufficient for being fully party to the jointly committed judgement. And it is perhaps worth noting that this feature of the view is highly desirable, because it is what enables boards and committees and other institutional bodies to achieve unity in group judgements even while there may remain candid disagreement at the individual level. This is how Gilbert’s model works to allow potentially radical differences between a judgement of the collective body and the judgements of individuals that compose it (Gilbert 1987, 2002). Still, once an individual group member is party to such a commitment, they are on the hook. This binding aspect of Gilbert’s plural subjectivity naturally renders it somewhat susceptible to objection when the model is applied to the breezier forms of group activity that seem more easy-come-easy-go. If people dance together for a while in a salsa club, and then one of them has had enough and wanders off to get a drink, isn’t that perfectly fine? No need for explanation, surely, let alone rebuke—that would be weird. That kind of dancing together is non-committal, but it is still dancing together. It lasts as long as it lasts, and that is part of the freedom of it. Bratman and Tuomela’s models can easily accommodate this kind of case, though obviously not Gilbert’s which is too demanding on the commitment front. But here I believe the correct conclusion to draw is that a certain pluralism is in order to accommodate the full range of ways we can do things together. It is precisely the bindingness of Gilbert’s model that makes it the right one for present purposes, for in order to make sense of the bindingness of ethos we need the commitment involved in the joint commitment that creates the plural subject of the ethos. An ethos is precisely not something pro tem, but something committed and intersubjectively binding by way of potential apt rebuke. A set of values that one can ditch when it no longer suits is no ethos at all, but mere lip service. The ethos of a group or institutional body is something that binds its members because it consists of value commitments in the robust sense of commitments that are temporally and counter-factually stable, or at least meant to be temporally and counter-factually stable. If a member proves their commitment less than appropriately stable by reneging on it, then they are properly subject to rebuke. I conclude that the joint commitment model is the distinctively appropriate model to employ in elaborating the collective value-dispositions involved in forming a given institutional ethos, and therefore the appropriate model in particular for the idea of an institutional epistemic ethos. To use the Gilbertian apparatus for these purposes is basically to engage in a piece of analogical thinking. Indeed, all talk of plural subjectivity is based on the elaboration of an analogy between the individual level and the group level, so that we may earn the right to speak literally of groups doing things like making a careful judgement that a given candidate has satisfied all the requirements for conferral of degree. Gilbert explains the very idea of a plural subject by way of

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an analogy between the relation of an individual’s will and the action it produces with the relation of a group’s pooled wills and the relation with the group action produced: these wills will be directed at that end, as if they belonged to a single person. That is, the coherence of the behaviour which is their output will approximate in coherence to the output of the will of a single person acting in pursuit of a goal of his own. (Gilbert 1989: 211) For our distinctly epistemic purposes at the level of institutions, my suggestion is that we invoke a similar analogy. We say that when an institutional body, like an examinations board, comes to a careful judgement that the candidate has satisfied the requirements, the board members’ individual wills (in the aspect relevant to epistemic agency) are directed at the end of coming to a careful judgement as if they belonged to a single adjudicator. On this basis, we may speak simply and literally of the exam board making the careful judgement in question. As we have seen, this model requires individual members to express willingness, under conditions of common knowledge, to at least go along with the group judgement made. Transposing this now to our proposed case of institutional epistemic ethos—an ethos, for example, of truthfulness and fact-checking in public office—we might say of an institutional body such as a branch of government: the individual officers all endorse, or at least go along with, the set of values that comprise an ethos of truthfulness and fact-checking in public office. Thus, parties to this jointly committed ethos would in theory rebuke anyone who was found to have lied or bullshitted in public office. It is worth emphasizing, as Gilbert does, that the expression of willingness can be very minimal. Indeed, in some contexts one can surely count as expressing willingness by default, by simply failing to object. Imagine, for example, a case in which there is general suspicion of a figure in political office that he is using his influence for personal political gain in an upcoming election—and yet no one is yet talking about it openly, and there remains a kind of group pretence that everything is as it should be, or at least within the bandwidth of normal political dealings. Those officers of the political institution in question are in the unfortunate position that their silence is a way of going along with the fiction that everything is okay. But it isn’t, and in their continued silence they passively become party to a joint commitment whose content is incompatible with the good institutional epistemic ethos proper to a democratic government. It will take a whistle-blower to break the silence, and that is a seriously costly thing to be for all sorts of reasons, but one feature of the pressures on a potential whistle-blower is that they are currently party to a joint commitment of silence. Whistle-blowers are admired by many, but they are also rebuked and often abused by many who wish to discredit them. Much of that is more politics and sheer threat in the context of power-mongering, but one aspect of it is proper to the basic normativity of joint commitment. It is built into Gilbert’s model that if you do at least go along with the silence for a while, you thereby become party

Institutional epistemic vices 97 to the joint commitment to conserve the status quo, so that if you then shift your stance and blow the whistle you are pro tanto a proper object of rebuke. In a real political case that may well be the least of an actual whistle-blower’s worries, but it is a real normative feature of such situations nonetheless, and one that can be exploited by those with an interest in conserving the silence. As Gilbert herself has emphasized in relation to group belief, this brings out the insidious potential of joint commitment: once made, it brings genuine normative pressure to bear, and there is no guarantee that this is to a good end of any kind. As in the example just given, it might work in the interests of a corrupt politician by creating genuine normative pressure not to break ranks. We can see better just how easily—how passively—this kind of situation can be manufactured if we reflect, further, on the phenomenon of ‘accommodation’ as Rae Langton has recently explored it. She takes up David Lewis’s notion of accommodation as a feature of scorekeeping in a language game (Lewis 1979). Lewis coins the idea to capture how a presupposition can enter circulation in a conversation and be accommodated if it is not actively challenged, and Langton elaborates how powerful this mechanism can be as a means of introducing prejudiced, stereotypical, or hateful ideas into conversational circulation. She calls assertions that enter in by way of presupposition ‘backdoor testimony’—assertions, indeed tellings of an inexplicit kind, that surreptitiously become accommodated and thereby perpetuated without challenge (Langton 2018). Similarly, I would suggest that the phenomenon of accommodation is useful for seeing one way that a default ‘expression of willingness’ to go along with the content of a given joint commitment can be a powerful force. An official can passively become party to a joint commitment to keep quiet about a political leader’s corrupt lies just by failing to dare to be a whistle-blower. One thereby accommodates the presupposition that the leader had engaged merely in acceptable levels of political hyperbole or bombast, even if one knows perfectly well they were lying. In such a case, a person with decent epistemic values becomes party to a committed toleration of corrupt mendacity, thereby passively betraying whatever may be left of the decent epistemic ethos of truthfulness in public office. Becoming party to a joint commitment, then, is easy—frighteningly so in some contexts—and this can be manipulated by those who wish to keep certain attitudes in circulation. The net result at group level is that the institutional body in question behaves in a way that departs from a pre-existing ethos of truthfulness and fact-checking. In this respect Gilbert’s model emerges once again as an excellent fit for modelling institutional ethos; only now we are concentrating on its credentials for modelling bad or vicious ethos. Every time officers in the government of our imagined truthless political leader go along with something he has said or presupposed, passively letting it stand and thereby accommodating it, they raise the level of pressure—genuine normative pressure—to conserve the status quo. The mechanism of joint commitment helps us understand a normative aspect of conspiracies of silence, but more importantly for present purposes it lays bare the mechanism of how institutional bodies can behave in ways that depart from, and help deteriorate, a pre-existing epistemic ethos of truthfulness

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and fact-checking. The insidious joint commitment to letting stand and thereby increasingly accommodating truthless content threatens to end in institutional epistemic failure—shifts of enduring commitment that risk entailing substantial erosion of good epistemic ethos in the medium to long term, bringing about a corruption of institutional character.

5.3 Modelling institutional epistemic vice Epistemic vices, like vices in general, can pertain to acts or behaviours, and they can pertain to agents. When a given agent displays a stable pattern of vicious actions and behaviours, then we attribute the vice not only to that which is done but also to the doer themselves. I committed myself earlier to a broadly responsibilist conception of virtuous action whose distinctive feature is its motivational richness—an inner or motivational element. No other model would be able to capture the importance we implicitly attach to the ethos at the heart of certain of our institutions. But it also includes a reliabilist aspect—an outer, or performative element. On the responsibilist conception, an epistemically virtuous agent is someone who acts from a temporally and counter-factually stable good motive and where the good end of that motive is reliably achieved (Battaly 2010; Zagzebski 1996). Thus, we are presented with both an inner and an outer element of virtue, and therefore two distinct areas for potential failure and lapse into vice. But not all failures will indicate vice. There must surely be some more neutral ground, not least because virtue itself comes in degrees, as an agent is increasingly habituated and spontaneous in her responses. If an agent—individual or institutional—acts in a manner that is less than ideal, but not culpably bad, then it would not be natural to use the word ‘vice’ to describe either them or their action. Imagine, for instance, an institution that has a good ethos, and so the inner element is fine, yet is inefficient in its performative aspect, so the outer aspect is less than it might be. A school, perhaps, with teachers who care about doing a good job, but an IT system for homework submission and marking that is not wellmanaged or well-used, and makes for occasionally serious communicative failures both with students and with parents. This is not an institution we would hold up as an exemplar of epistemic virtue as regards its information-sharing practices; indeed we would criticize it, but we would not go so far as to describe it as guilty of any epistemic vice.8 This said, we can return to the previous point that the responsibilist conception makes for two distinct areas of potential culpable failure—the inner ethos (stable motives), and the outer performance (achievement of the ends of those motives). If vices are culpable failures of virtue, then epistemic vices are culpable failures of epistemic virtue either in respect of ethos and/or in respect of (what we might call) implementation. Imagine our school does seriously mess things up one year, so that teachers have practically given up using the online homework system but no proper alternative has been put in place. And imagine the mess up is bad enough— disruptive enough to cause a real loss of confidence on the part of the students and parents—so that the school is culpable. Now we are looking at a behaviour on the

Institutional epistemic vices 99 part of the school that would count as vicious as regards its practices of information-sharing. But this ‘thinking vice’9 might yet be out of character for the school, so it does not yet imply that the school itself—the institution—has the vice. That attribution would require a temporally and counter-factually extended pattern of such culpable lapses of virtue as regards information-sharing practices. So let us now imagine our school ten years on, after a decade of becoming increasingly inefficient and disorganized, even while it had opportunities to do better. The teachers have become disenchanted and fed up so that despondency and laziness has infected the whole-school ethos, and/or, despite continued underlying value commitments, the school has simply fallen into repeated performative failures in the implementation of its policies on information-sharing. One way or the other this would now be a school that displayed an epistemic vice of bad informationsharing. The various culpable failures of virtue have congealed into a systematic failure, so that the very character of the institution has been changed for the worse. Institutional epistemic vice is a matter of culpable epistemic bad habits, where the culpable lapses might be in ethos or in implementation, or in both. Charlie Crerar has critiqued what he calls the ‘mirror view’ of epistemic vices, one form of which depicts vices as always positively aiming at an epistemically bad end, mirroring the way virtues always aim at a good one (Crerar 2018). The critique is persuasive—in fact it is not easy to dream up even a single psychologically coherent epistemic vice of that kind because of the fundamental investment in truth/knowledge that all epistemic subjects as such have. Jason Baehr imagines a far-fetched case of epistemic malevolence that would fit the bill (Baehr 2010), and perhaps another promising prospect in this regard might be persistent kinds of self-deception—imagine someone with a long-term investment in lying to themselves about how talented they are, for instance. Still, such cases will surely be unusual at best, so that on the whole any motivational disorder constituting an epistemic vice will instead take the negative form of an inadequate commitment to good epistemic ends. These ends might be the ultimate end of cognitive contact with reality—as in the case where the politician shows a flagrant disregard for the truth—or, alternatively, any of the mediate ends whose epistemic value consists in their functioning as a means to achieving that ultimate end. Such mediate ends might be, for instance, looking carefully at the evidence, fact-checking, being open to counter-arguments, realizing when one’s evidence base is too narrow, and so on. It may not be possible to be epistemically virtuous without an appropriate commitment to the ultimate end of cognitive contact with reality, but it does not follow that only a lapse in relation to that ultimate end can indicate epistemic vice. On the contrary, I contend that someone might be epistemically vicious precisely because of persistent lapses in relation to a mediate end—such as fact-checking— even if their ultimate epistemic commitment remained intact. This possibility is entirely compatible with the background theoretical idea that only the value of the ultimate end confers value on the mediate end—so, for instance, the only reason fact-checking matters epistemically is because fact-checking promotes cognitive contact with reality. Indeed, my contention positively relies on the instrumental connection between mediate and ultimate ends, for what makes it epistemically

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bad, and potentially culpable, to fail to fact-check is precisely that failing to factcheck is bad from the point of view of achieving cognitive contact with reality. It is because of this instrumental connection between fact-checking and cognitive contact with reality that a lapse in the former can, if culpable, constitute an epistemic vice. As regards this kind of epistemic vice, the distinguishing feature is that the subject is to blame for how at least one of their mediate motives is failing to align with the ultimate end of cognitive contact with reality. Crerar imagines two figures, Galileo and Dave, each of whom seems to present a clear case of epistemic vice and yet each of whom is equally clearly committed to epistemically good ultimate ends.10 Galileo is individually brilliant and cares about the truth, but he is also epistemically arrogant in his scornful neglect of the views of his colleagues; Dave displays a lamentable narrow-mindedness of the privileged, even though he, too, cares about the truth. I agree these characters surely display epistemic vices, and I agree that they would represent a puzzle to anyone arguing for a conception of epistemic vice that required a motivational lapse in respect of ultimate ends. But for the reasons offered above, I would interpret Galileo and Dave as exemplifying epistemic vices in virtue of the fact that each is culpably unmotivated towards a relevant mediate end—respectively, that of listening to one’s fellow researchers’ informed opinions, and that of awareness of how privilege is affecting one’s social perceptions. Such culpable lapses in relation to mediate epistemic ends is perfectly sufficient for epistemic vice.11 Like Crerar, I do not hold to any exclusively motivational conception of vice, but this is not because I do not see Galileo and Dave’s epistemic failings as motivational failings. I interpret both Galileo and Dave as displaying vices by exhibiting mediate motivational failings that undermine their epistemic orientation to cognitive contact with reality, even while they both may remain psychologically motivated to achieve it. For me, the reason to reject an exclusively motivational account of vice is simply that motivational failure is not the only route to vice, since a culpable lapse in the outer, performative aspect of virtue remains an independent possibility. Remember our informationally challenged school at the moment where its flawed information-sharing practices have become seriously entrenched, despite a continuing good ethos. This school is displaying an epistemic vice of sloppy information-sharing even though there is nothing wrong with it at the motivational level of ethos; the problem and the culpability is all at the performative level. A person or institution can display epistemic vice simply through persistent performative failure, even if the motivational commitments, mediate and ultimate, are all that they should be. On the view I am putting forward, then, epistemic vice consists in some culpable lapse of epistemic virtue either (i) in its inner aspect of mediate and/or ultimate motivations to good epistemic ends, and/or (ii) in its outer aspect of performance— the achievement of those ends. A motivational and/or performative lapse that is bad enough to warrant blame is bad enough to warrant the label ‘vice’. Where it is persistent it will constitute a vice of epistemic character and not merely a more fleeting vice of thinking. Putting together the earlier picture of institutional ethos with this conception of epistemic vice, we can say that institutional epistemic

Institutional epistemic vices 101 vices are displayed—either in thinking or, where persistent, also at the level of institutional character—whenever there are culpable lapses in the institution’s epistemic ethos and/or in the implementation of its ends.

5.4 The institutional vice of inferential inertia A salient rationale for a philosophical vindication of the idea of institutional epistemic vice is that there may be some epistemic vices that are especially worth identifying in their institutional form, either because they are especially pernicious in that form, or because they are especially fixable, or both. I want to draw attention to an epistemic vice I will call the vice of inferential inertia. I think we easily recognize a certain scenario in an individual hearer, who is not guilty of perpetrating any testimonial injustice exactly, for their credibility judgement of the speaker is not depressed by prejudice of any kind, and indeed (let us imagine) they do believe her; and yet … nothing else happens by way of epistemic follow-through. Imagine a case of someone telling a colleague or co-worker of a crime committed in the workplace. Imagine the colleague believes what she tells them—they assent, they express genuine sympathy or shock, or whatever is in order—and yet … somehow the evidential bearing of what they have been told does not impact anywhere (else) in their belief system. Perhaps they are resistant to the implications of this particular piece of news, and hope it is a one-off, or perhaps they are epistemically lazy or scared or unimaginative when it comes to shaking their sense of the status quo. Such a person, let us imagine, fails to draw any inferences at all, does not alter her other beliefs one iota, even though they are likely seriously undermined by what she has been told and now believes. For instance, their other beliefs about the perpetrator remain unaltered, or at least are certainly not altered in a manner appropriate to the evidence.12 They somehow hold the contradictory beliefs in suspension without making the cognitive effort to draw the inferences that are there to be drawn, even tentatively. This person believes what they are told, but the new information never gets to have its evidential impact. They are guilty of a distinctive epistemic vice, that of inferential inertia. In such a case, though the speaker is not misjudged epistemically, still she is just as frustrated in her aim to bring the hearer to appreciate the implications of what she’s saying as she would have been in an ordinary case of testimonial injustice. From the point of view of inferential uptake, she might just as well have not been believed. We might slot this phenomenon of inferential inertia into relation with testimonial injustice by saying that insofar as any case of inferential inertia is the product of prejudice, then it is a close relation of testimonial injustice, and instantiates a hybrid ethical-epistemic vice, or, alternatively, insofar as a given case is the result of some other kind of epistemically culpable error, it displays a plain epistemic vice—in this case the kind of stupidity inherent in failing to grasp clear implications of new information.13 I think we can easily identify various institutional forms of exactly this epistemic vice. How many feedback forms does one fill out, whether online or by hand, after a doctor’s appointment, a retail experience, a meal at a restaurant, an

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online purchase, or even a trip to the dentist, where the much-vaunted feedback, accompanied by apparently sincere declarations of just how much they really want to know how they can do better, in fact passes into an institutional void. Too often the fact of having such a mechanism notionally in operation is all that the institution really cares about (they can tick that box), so that the evidential import of any of the content actually fed back is entirely lost. This is the institutional epistemic vice of inferential inertia, and it is rapidly becoming a normal part of our institutional environment. Looking to a gravely serious example from UK institutional life we can see a quite different way in which it can be important to diagnose an institutional epistemic vice: in the BBC-commissioned independent review led by Dame Janet Smith into the BBC’s culture and practices in the years when Jimmy Savile was committing multiple predatory sexual crimes, we see that this epistemic vice of inferential inertia was effectively a key part of the diagnosis of what went wrong institutionally speaking so that he was allowed, even enabled, to commit these crimes undetected for so long. Dame Janet’s review emphasizes certain cultural aspects of the BBC at the time, one of which is a climate of not complaining and in particular not complaining about the Talent: 5.4.1 The culture of not complaining about the talent 54. As I have said, there was a culture of not complaining about anything. The culture of not complaining about a member of the Talent was even stronger. Members of the Talent, such as Savile, were to a real degree, protected from complaint. The first reason for this is because of a deference or even adulation which was, and still can be, accorded to celebrity in our society. The second reason was because of the attitude within the BBC towards the Talent. The evidence I heard suggested that the Talent was treated with kid gloves and rarely challenged. An example of this is the attitude of C51’s supervisor when he was told that Savile had sexually assaulted C51 (see paragraphs 5.254–5.255 of my Report). His immediate reply was ‘Keep your mouth shut, he is a VIP’. (Smith 2016) The review also emphasizes a ‘culture of separation’ and the ‘silo mentality’ that entailed there was very little information-sharing between different parts of the BBC. Competitiveness between departments exacerbated the situation, since it incentivized secretiveness about anything that might prove a liability to one’s home department. The net result was that even when suspicions were raised or a complaint made in one place these would not go any further in the epistemic economy of the organization: 61. This sense of separation could mean that a concern which arose in one part of the BBC would not be transmitted to or discussed with another part.

Institutional epistemic vices 103 For example, in 1973, Douglas Muggeridge does not appear to have shared his concern about Savile with anyone in Television. I accept that, if an issue was considered by the Board of Management, it would be known of by senior management across the BBC. For example, when concerns arose about possible misconduct at Top of the Pops, there was some discussion at a meeting of the Board of Management. Soon afterwards, there was discussion about this kind of issue at the Management Director Radio’s weekly meetings. But if an issue was not raised at such a meeting, its chances of going across the BBC were slight. 62. At a lower level, there could be a reluctance to discuss a problem which arose in one department with personnel in another. This seems to have been attributable to the sense of competitiveness which prevailed between programme making departments. (Smith 2016) Now if we consider the BBC as a collective epistemic subject, what we are presented with here is a characterization of an organization whose informational states were radically unintegrated both because of an ethos failing and because of a structural performative failing. The ethos failings consist in the climate of not making complaints about the Talent; combined with the competitiveness between departments. The report also goes into ‘the macho culture’ in the organization especially around issues of sexual harassment. The structural performative failing is organizational—the fact that different departments were unintegrated and lacked channels of communication between them that would have enabled information-sharing: 63 Even within the same programme, there could be difficulties of communication in relation to complaints. Staff working on a programme would not necessarily have the same line manager. Staff working on the production team would be part of a line of management which ran through the producer, maybe to an executive producer and from there to the head of department. Other staff would have a different management line – for example, the floor manager would not report to the programme producer but to his or her own line manager in the Studio Management Department. That was because the provision of floor management was a central service provided to a programme. Cameramen, sound engineers and audience supervisors had similar separate management structures. This separation seems to me to have the potential for preventing anyone in management from seeing the bigger picture. 5.4.2 The macho culture 64. Another reason why complaints or concerns of a sexual nature might not have been passed up the BBC as they should have been related to the ‘macho culture’ which some witnesses said was present in some (but not all) departments of the BBC. Particular complaint was made about the behaviour and

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Miranda Fricker attitudes of technical staff (who were almost entirely male) and of management in Radio 1 and Television’s Light Entertainment Department, where there [were] very few women in senior positions. I have the impression that sexual harassment was more common in the Light Entertainment Department and BBC Radio 1 (the areas where Savile worked) than in many other parts of the BBC. Women found it difficult to report sexual harassment. Generally, the attitude of the male managers was thought to be unsympathetic and, of course, there were very few female managers. (Smith 2016)

A figure such as Savile could consequently operate relatively freely in his sexual predation in the knowledge that suspicions raised in one department were unlikely to spread, and therefore unlikely to be treated by anybody as evidentially significant. The portrait of the BBC is as an organization which was at that time seriously epistemically unintegrated when it came to the kind of information that was needed to properly pick up on what Savile was doing. People would make complaints, and even if they were believed, the informational content would go nowhere, receiving little to no inferential follow-through. The informational compartmentalization of the organization effectively ensured that the scattered items of information would never amass into a body of evidence, and be treated as such, but would remain inferentially inert epistemic particles dispersed in the organization. The upshot is a portrait of an organization that had serious ethos problems of shielding the Talent, inter-departmental competitiveness and protectionism, and a ‘macho culture’ especially as regards sexual harassment. In addition to these culpable defects in ethos, there was the significant structural performative failure relating to extreme compartmentalization and consequent inadequate information-sharing. All of this adds up, epistemically speaking, to a paradigm example of the institutional vice of inferential inertia. The only upside is that its diagnosis instructively lays bare exactly the kinds of innovations required to improve the situation and to help ensure against recurrences. I have proposed a conception of epistemic vice such that any culpable lapse in motivational and/or performative elements of epistemic virtue is sufficient for it. And I have applied Gilbert’s joint commitment conception of collective agency in order to elaborate what is involved in having an institutional epistemic ethos. An institutional body whose actions systematically betray a jointly committed good epistemic ethos, and/or whose performance systematically fails to achieve the good ends of that ethos, is an institution that displays an epistemic vice. Lastly, I have offered a sketch of one institutional epistemic vice in particular, which I have called the vice of inferential inertia. Though it can occur in individuals, its institutional form seems particularly relevant to social life these days. It can occur in both trivial and deadly serious forms, and it has been publicly revealed to have found disastrous expression in a valued institution. I hope to have shown it is an institutional epistemic vice worth distinguishing and understanding.14

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Notes 1 See Baehr (2011), Battaly (2010 & 2015), Cassam (2019), Medina (2013). The term ‘vice epistemology’ was, I believe, coined by Cassam in his 2016 paper of that name. 2 For a defence of the need, indeed ‘inevitability’, of such virtues see Madva (2019). 3 See Lahroodi (2007), Sandin (2007), Fricker (2010 & 2013), and Konsellmann Ziv (2012). See also, however, the treatment of group epistemic polarization by BroncanoBerrocal and Carter (2020), which treats the tendency for a given group to incline towards a more extreme belief than the beliefs of any of its constituent individual members as a collective epistemic vice. I thank Charlie Crerar for directing me to their work on this. 4 I discuss this case in more detail in Fricker (2013) and my present purpose is to develop more fully some initial ideas I put forward there concerning institutional vice. 5 For an account of collective agency, specifically those cast as ‘we-mode groups’, that makes use of a notion of an ethos as part of their characteristic ‘we-thinking’, see Tuomela (2007, 2013 and 2017). 6 The germinal opus for the motivationally rich conception of intellectual virtue, which later attracted the label ‘responsibilist’, is Linda Zagzebski’s Virtues of the Mind (1996). 7 Gilbert (1989) is the locus classicus; more recently see, for instance, Gilbert (2013); and for a focus on the epistemic see, for example, Gilbert (2004). 8 In this I may differ slightly from Cassam, who explicitly leaves room for the possibility of vices that are criticisable but non-blameworthy because, for instance, the agents lack the power to correct the intellectual defect in question, such as the cultural prejudice that infected their judgement (Cassam 2019; ix, and ch. 6, especially p. 97). Instead I would tend to categorize such cases as in principle blameworthy—some people in the same context after all were able to resist the prejudicial pressures of the day—but where the cultural context of prejudice might make excuses applicable to reduce the appropriate level of blame. 9 ‘Closed-mindedness as a quality of a particular piece of thinking is a thinking vice, an epistemically vicious way of thinking or ‘thinking style’. It is one thing to be closedminded and another to think closed-mindedly’ (Cassam 2019: 56). 10 The example of Galileo’s arrogance is from Robert Roberts and Jay Wood (2007: 254), as quoted in Crerar (2018). 11 See also Tanesini (2019). 12 Eliana Peck has suggested in conversation that the case of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee (September 2018) concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is a prime example of this. Blasey Ford was widely considered a manifestly credible witness, and it also seems was in fact believed, and yet her testimony may as well have not been believed for all the relevant inferential activity it provoked regarding the question in hand. 13 Inferential inertia might also be involved in what Patrick Bondy (2010) calls ‘argumentative injustice’, which is presented as an adaptation of testimonial injustice, since it involves a hearer giving a prejudicially depressed level of credibility to a speaker’s argument. (Bondy, however, focuses exclusively on the effects of negative identity prejudice, rather than prejudice more generally.) 14 I thank Quassim Cassam and Charlie Crerar for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

References Axtell, Guy (2000) ed. Knowledge, Belief, and Character (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Baehr, Jason (2010) “Epistemic Malevolence,” in H. Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell): 189–213.

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Baehr, Jason (2011) The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Battaly, Heather (ed.) (2010) Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). Battaly, Heather (2015) “A Pluralist Theory of Virtue,” in Mark Alfano (ed.), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory (New York: Routledge). Bondy, Patrick (2010) “Argumentative Injustice,” Informal Logic 30 (3): 263–278. Bratman, Michael E. (1999) Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bratman, Michael E. (2014) Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press). Broncano-Berrocal, Fernando, and J. Adam Carter. (2020). The Philosophy of Group Polarization (London: Routledge). Cassam, Quassim (2016) “Vice Epistemology,” Monist 99 (2): 159–180. Cassam, Quassim (2019) Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Crerar, Charlie (2018) “Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (4): 753–766. Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Fricker, Miranda (2010) “Can There Be Institutional Virtues?” in Tamar S. Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology (Special Theme: Social Epistemology) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 235–252. Fricker, Miranda (2013) ‘Epistemic Justice as a Condition of Political Freedom,” Synthese 190 (7): 1317–1332. Gilbert, Margaret (1987) “Modelling Collective Belief,” Synthese 73 (1): 185–204. Gilbert, Margaret (1989) On Social Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Gilbert, Margaret (2000) Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural Subject Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Gilbert, Margaret (2002) “Belief and Acceptance as Features of Groups,” Protosociology 16: 35–69. Gilbert, Margaret (2004) “Collective Epistemology,” Episteme 1 (2): 95–107. Gilbert, Margaret (2013) Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Konsellman Ziv, Anita (2012) “Institutional Virtue: How Consensus Matters,” Philosophical Studies 161 (1): 87–96. Lahroodi, Reza (2007) “Collective Epistemic Virtues,” Social Epistemology, 21: 281–97. Langton, Rae (2018) “Blocking as Counter-Speech,” in Daniel Harris, Daniel Fogal, and Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts (New York: Oxford University Press): 144–164. Lewis, David (1979) “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 339–359. List, Christian and Pettit, Philip (2011) Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Macpherson, Sir William (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny (London: The Stationery Office) https://assets.publi shing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/2771 11/4262.pdf

Institutional epistemic vices 107 Madva, Alex (2019) “The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue,” in Stacey Goguen and Benjamin R. Sherman (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice (London: Rowman & Littlefield): 85–99. Medina, José (2013) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Roberts, Robert and Wood, Jay (2007) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Sandin, Per (2007) “Collective Military Virtues,” Journal of Military Ethics 6(4): 303–314. Smith, Dame Janet (2016) The Dame Janet Smith Review Report: An Independent Review into the BBC’s Culture and Practices During the Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall Years (London: BBC). Tanesini, Alessandra (2019) “Epistemic Vice and Motivation,” Metaphilosophy 49 (3): 350–367. Tuomela, Raimo (2007) The Philosophy of Sociality (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Tuomela, Raimo (2013) Social Ontology (New York: Oxford University Press). Tuomela, Raimo (2017) “The Limits of Groups, An Author Responds,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (11): 28–33. Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Capital vices, institutional failures, and epistemic neglect in a county jail José Medina

This chapter examines the phenomenon of communicative and epistemic neglect, that is, the phenomenon of being disregarded in communicative and epistemic practices. The chapter elucidates this phenomenon through the case study of the neglect of inmates in a county jail in Durham, North Carolina. In my analysis I will highlight the vices that we can ascribe both to individuals and to institutions within the criminal justice system. I will also address the kinds of activism needed, inside and outside an institution such as a county jail, in order to produce effective transformations. I will focus on what I call epistemic activism and the kinds of interpersonal and institutional transformations it can help achieve. Using the theoretical framework of vice epistemology, this chapter studies the phenomenon of communicative and epistemic neglect, that is, the phenomenon of being abandoned as a subject of communication and knowledge. Victims of communicative and epistemic neglect still have communicative and epistemic agency, but their speech acts are ignored or receive defective uptake, and their potential contributions to knowledge and understanding are blocked or diminished. Communicative and epistemic neglect are closely related to moral neglect, that is, the phenomenon of being excluded from the moral community or being neglected as a moral subject worthy of respect and dignity. Phenomena of communicative and epistemic neglect interact with phenomena of moral neglect in complex ways. To begin with, moral neglect will typically lead to, and will be typically manifested in and through, forms of communicative and epistemic neglect: being excluded as a moral subject will often result in not being talked to or in not having one’s words taken seriously for the production and dissemination of knowledge and understanding. On the other hand, it is also important to note that communicative and epistemic neglect is itself a form of moral neglect, and it involves a moral harm since it consists in not being treated with the dignity and respect of a subject capable of communication and knowledge. Moreover, communicative and epistemic neglect will deepen and entrench previously existing forms of moral neglect and can facilitate new ones. Although the communicative, epistemic, and moral aspects of neglect are difficult to separate from one another and I will address all of them in this chapter, I will focus on the distinctively epistemic side of being neglected and the epistemic harms it produces, while paying attention also to the communicative and moral elements of epistemic neglect and the resulting harms.

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 109 This chapter aims at drawing a distinction between capital and non-capital or venial epistemic vices of subjects and institutions as they appear in cases of epistemic neglect. More specifically, I will examine how a capital epistemic vice of an institution can lead to corrupted sensibilities and epistemic dysfunctions in testimonial dynamics in which people’s expressive behavior is systematically disregarded. I will argue that once an epistemic pathology is triggered by a capital epistemic vice of an institution (such as the police or the criminal justice system), two things need to happen to repair the pathology and to produce fair epistemic dynamics: (1) redesigning the institutions with new protocols and procedures that guarantee fair epistemic treatment; and (2) new training and the creation of a new climate and culture, so that a new sensibility can flourish and epistemic virtues can be cultivated.

6.1 Introduction In the months leading to his death in 2016, Matthew McCain, a jail inmate at the Durham County Detention Facility (hereafter DCDF), had reported months of insufficient and inconsistent medical treatment for his diabetes and epilepsy while incarcerated. Early on January 19th 2016, McCain suffered a seizure while detainees in his pod, repeatedly pressed emergency call buttons and yelled for help. According to detainee witnesses, these calls were not answered by the detention officer on duty, and McCain died without assistance. The Durham Sheriff’s Office does not publically announce in-custody deaths, except to oversight officials and the deceased’s registered next of kin, so previous deaths in the jail have garnered no press coverage and little public attention. This time, however, detainee witnesses immediately reached out through intermediaries to the community organizers of Inside-Outside Alliance. Convinced that McCain’s death was a direct result of medical neglect and unresponsiveness by detention officers, detainee witnesses wanted to alert McCain’s loved ones and draw attention to conditions in the jail. Together with McCain’s family, InsideOutside Alliance broke the story to local news media and published reports on its own website, Amplify Voices Inside. In turn, inquiries from journalists prompted the Sheriff’s Office and the Durham County Department of Public Health to release public statements on McCain’s death, and to acknowledge two other recent deaths in the jail. The guards on duty during McCain’s death displayed a complete lack of concern for his well-being, which is primarily a moral failing, but they also displayed a systematic epistemic failing: the guards repeatedly contended that they do not take seriously the inmates’ emergency calls because they do not believe them. The excerpt quoted above is from a forthcoming co-authored essay that I wrote with activist-scholar Matt Whitt entitled “Epistemic Activism and the Politics of Credibility: Testimonial Injustice Inside/Outside a North Carolina Jail.” In this

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essay we explore how the epistemic failing of the guards on duty led to McCain’s death by medical neglect, but we also address how this cannot be properly understood as an isolated instance to be blamed solely on the failings of the guards on duty. The recent deaths of two other jail inmates were acknowledged by the authorities, and other such deaths in recent years were investigated. Clearly we are dealing here with a pattern and a systemic problem in which we need to attend not only to the epistemic failings of the individuals involved—it is not enough to say that we are dealing with “a few bad apples” or a few bad detention officers—but also to the epistemic failings of the institution—the orchard itself, so to speak, is corrupted. We are dealing with a vitiated institutional space which, far from guaranteeing that the voices of the jail inmates are properly heard, stacks the decks against their voices receiving proper uptake, that is, an institutional space that encourages epistemic dysfunctions and in which epistemic vices flourish. The focus of my analysis will be the epistemic vice of testimonial insensitivity both as a personal and as an institutional epistemic failing. What I call testimonial insensitivity can be understood not as a single, monolithic epistemic vice but, rather, as an umbrella term that includes a complex constellation of epistemic vices that can take many shapes—just as epistemic injustice is a generic, umbrella term that contains sub-types and different kinds of epistemic vices. As Quassim Cassam (2019) has explained, in cases of epistemically vicious behavior it is often the case that different kinds of vices converge and work together, and, as he shows with great analytical depth, there is a wide variety of epistemic vices that can be classified into three categories: vicious attitudes, vicious personality traits, and vicious ways of thinking. In my analysis of the particular shape that testimonial insensitivity took in the case of McCain’s death by medical neglect at DCDF, the epistemic vice that will take center-stage is incredulity1—which, interestingly, is a vicious doxastic attitude that has not received as much attention as its opposite, the epistemic vice of excessive credulity or gullibility. But there are many other vicious attitudes and personality traits that support the testimonial insensitivity of detention officers at DCDF: in particular, closed-mindedness, epistemic arrogance, incuriosity, and epistemic laziness. And there is also a vicious way of thinking at work here which we can describe as prejudicial or stigmatizing thinking: namely, thinking according to a carceral logic that treats detained and incarcerated subjects as intrinsically suspect and untrustworthy, and treats inmates as cry-babies in need of discipline rather than care and protection (Cacho 2012, Medina and Whitt forthcoming). But more importantly, cases of death by medical neglect at DCDF such as McCain’s could not have happened without the active complicity of the carceral institution itself, and the epistemic dysfunction behind the unattended calls for help reveals epistemically vicious structural conditions: namely, structural conditions in which the incredulity and testimonial insensitivity of detention officers could be acted on with impunity. I will argue that the institution itself, and not just the particular detention officers who happen to be on duty, exhibits the epistemic vice of incredulity, the vicious attitude of not trusting the inmate’s voices and not taking their words at

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 111 face value systematically, as a matter of epistemic policy. Such institutional epistemic vice could be discontinued, and the testimonial insensitivity of detention officers short-circuited, by protocols that force detention officers to take seriously and respond to emergency calls and, more generally, by institutional epistemic policies according to which an inmate’s words and expressive behavior have to be taken at face value. This is what activist organizations such as the Inside/Outside Alliance demand when they suggest that carceral institutions should implement a policy of Believing Inmates. But critics reply that carceral institutions would fall into the epistemic vice of gullibility if they were to follow this epistemic policy. I will come back to this issue, but it suffices to note for now that, since it is the duty of a carceral institution and of its officers to protect the safety and well-being of inmates, it is difficult to see that there could be such thing as taking their emergency calls too seriously or believing them too much when it comes to matters of life and death.2 In addition to this, the specific carceral institution I am focusing on is a county jail in which the overwhelming majority of inmates are awaiting trial and have not been convicted of any crime, and DCDF has a legal and an ethical obligation to presume their innocence. However, the evidence strongly suggests that stigmas of criminality vitiate DCDF’s institutional attitudes towards the inmates and, unfortunately, this seems to be typical of all carceral institutions in the US, including jails.3 Following Cassam (2019), I will not focus on the specific motivation or etiology of the epistemic vices at work in the testimonial insensitivity of the detention officers or of the jail as an institution, but rather on their consequences. Cassam has defended a compelling consequentialist view of epistemic vice that he calls obstructivism. According to obstructivism, epistemic vices are to be understood as attitudes, personality traits, or ways of thinking that “get in the way of knowledge,” that is, that obstruct epistemic activities. I will follow Cassam’s obstructivist view in my analysis and in the exploration of the question of which epistemic vices can be deemed capital vices in terms of their disastrous consequences. My aim will be to explore what, within the testimonial insensitivity of DCDF and its guards, counts as a capital epistemic vice that derails the epistemic interactions between inmates and guards and obstructs the very possibility of sharing knowledge. What could have possibly gone so wrong that the calls for help on behalf of a dying individual could go unanswered, blatantly and outrageously disregarded precisely by those in charge of protecting his life? What could possibly have gone so calamitously wrong in the sensibility of those guards so that they were able to leave those desperate cries for help unattended? And how is an institution set up so that it allows its officers to exercise an epistemic insensitivity that incapacitates them to listen properly to the voices of subjects in need? This chapter offers some preliminary answers to these questions. In the first section I will elucidate how certain vices at the core of a testimonial sensibility can disable a subject’s proper epistemic functioning, and in the second section I will elucidate how epistemic vices at the core of an institution’s design can vitiate its whole modus operandi. In these diagnostic sections I will try to distinguish between venial epistemic vices that do not compromise

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the epistemic character or functioning of a subject or system in toto and can be treated through sporadic measures and interventions, on the one hand, and capital epistemic vices that paralyze or vitiate the overall epistemic functioning of an individual or system, on the other.4 What I call capital (or cardinal) epistemic vices are those with maximal obstructionist power, that is, those vices that put spikes in the wheels of a cognitive mechanism or epistemic system, so to speak. Note that as I draw this distinction, it is not a categorical but a gradual distinction, so that we can talk about epistemic vices being more or less capital. On my view, capital epistemic vices need highlighting just because of their particularly harmful consequences and obstructionist potential, and not necessarily because they have genetic or explanatory priority over other (venial) epistemic vices. Capital epistemic vices are those that derail the overall epistemic functioning of individuals and institutions. In the final, brief, concluding section, I will explore the ways in which we can resist the formation or continuation of capital epistemic vices. I will argue for combining a character-based approach and an institutional approach, so that we use a hybrid view of epistemic resistance that addresses the interpersonal/ interactive and the structural/institutional aspects of deep epistemic corruptions or dysfunctions simultaneously.

6.2 Falling into the abyss of epistemic corruption (I): corrupted testimonial sensibility On my view, there is no catalog of capital epistemic vices we can provide. The distinction between capital and non-capital or venial epistemic vices, first suggested by Ian James Kidd (2017), cannot be drawn as an absolute distinction by looking at each epistemic vice in isolation according to some pre-established ethics or politics of knowing that postulates a fixed hierarchy of epistemic goods and valuable features. Rather, the distinction is a practical and functional one that has to be drawn case by case by looking at how the epistemic vice in question functions holistically within the subject or institution that has it and within particular contexts, and by looking at what the epistemic vice does epistemically to the subject or institution in question as well as to others whom it affects. There are two different criteria that we could use to draw a consequentialist distinction between capital and non-capital when we examine a particular epistemic vice in a particular context (or set of contexts): (1) according to the scope and depth of the epistemic disablement that the vice produces in the subject or institution that exhibits it (epistemic self-harm); and (2) according to the scope and depth of the epistemic harms that it produces for others in (or through) the relevant epistemic interactions. We can say that an epistemic vice has become capital for a particular subject or institution in a particular context if (1) the vice leads to forms of epistemic disablement that obstruct epistemic well-functioning and derail epistemic cooperation; or (2) the vice leads to epistemic interactions that endanger the epistemic dignity and agency of others in important ways. I will call criterion (1) the lack-of-proper-epistemic-functioning criterion, and criterion (2) the

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 113 lack-of-proper-epistemic-relationality criterion. If an epistemic flaw triggers the satisfaction of one of these criteria, that alone is sufficient to establish that the flaw has become a capital epistemic vice. On my view, each of these criteria is independently sufficient to establish that an epistemic vice has become capital, and although very often both criteria will be satisfied simultaneously, as we shall see, there can be cases in which only one of them is satisfied and that alone will suffice. Note also that the application of these criteria has to be carefully contextualized. The key question is whether an epistemic flaw or failing satisfies one of these criteria in the relevant contexts, not in every possible context. Thus, for example, in the case of the epistemic neglect of inmates by detention officers in DCDF, the key issue is whether the officers’ incredulity with respect to inmates’ utterances and expressive behavior disables their proper epistemic functioning in the county jail, not in every possible context; for, indeed, these officers may function properly in epistemic activities and interactions outside the county jail, but if, because of the vicious attitude of incredulity with respect to inmates, they do not process information adequately, they become incapable of giving proper uptake, they become epistemically lazy, etc., we can say that the vice of incredulity has indeed vitiated their entire epistemic functioning inside the jail and, within that context, they have become corrupted epistemic subjects. Note that there are good reasons to think that the lack-of-proper-epistemicfunctioning criterion and the lack-of-proper-epistemic-relationality criterion will often be satisfied simultaneously since it is to be expected that there will be traffic and interaction between proper epistemic functioning and proper epistemic relationality. On the one hand, if the inability to function properly epistemically deepens (with epistemic failings such as being closed-minded, thinking arrogantly, being epistemically lazy and careless, etc., piling up), the growing epistemic disablement is likely to vitiate one’s epistemic relations to others (one’s ability to listen properly, to trust, to give uptake, to make good use of others’ epistemic contributions, etc.). In other words, sustained epistemic disablement undermines epistemic cooperation and cuts one off from healthy epistemic relations. On the other hand, if one’s epistemic relations to others become vitiated, this will surely affect one’s own epistemic development by diminishing the opportunities to properly exercise one’s epistemic capacities and cultivate epistemic virtues while increasing the opportunities to develop epistemic limitations and flaws. In other words, vitiated epistemic relations with others are likely to undermine one’s epistemic flourishing and to contribute to the development of epistemic vices. Now that I have offered a preliminary description of the criteria by which we can deem an epistemic flaw a capital epistemic vice, let’s look more closely into how exactly not only the detention officers in DCDF who neglected inmates’ calls for help, but also the institution itself, can be said to satisfy these criteria and, therefore, be guilty of (blameworthy or at least criticizable for)5 a capital epistemic vice. In particular, let’s examine the different kinds of harms that can be identified according to the two criteria laid out: epistemic self-harms as identified in the lack-of-proper-epistemic-functioning criterion, and epistemic harms to others as identified in the lack-of-proper-epistemic-relationality criterion. For,

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indeed, what motivates drawing a distinction between capital and venial epistemic vices is the need to be more attentive to (and to repair) the harms that result from such vices, starting with the deepest and most menacing harms. Far from being a mere academic exercise, drawing this distinction has a clear payoff. Usually epistemic vices come in complex and broad clusters within a corrupted mind or an epistemic pathology, and it is important to identify which vices lie at the very core of the epistemic dysfunction, corruption, or pathology—which ones have the most harmful consequences—so that they receive special attention and they are given priority in our corrective and reparative practices of epistemic resistance. For example, in some cases, misplaced incredulity may become a capital epistemic vice and should then receive our most urgent attention because it corrupts the subject’s or institution’s epistemic functioning, resulting in serious epistemic self-harm, but also because it forecloses or thwarts epistemic interactions in which people are not heard, or their voices are distorted, or their testimony is unfairly discredited, etc., therefore resulting in serious epistemic harms to others. In other cases, however, misplaced incredulity may function as a venial epistemic vice that does not have serious harmful consequences, either in terms of epistemic self-harm for its possessor or in terms of harms to others. Let’s see how incredulity with respect to inmates’ utterances and expressive behavior seems to have functioned in those cases of epistemic neglect at DCDF that resulted in the death of inmates by medical neglect. Consider the incredulity of detention officers at DCDF as it operates when they tend to disregard inmates’ emergency calls because they do not believe that they are really in need of urgent help. From a consequentialist and obstructionist perspective, this incredulous attitude is vicious in the sense that it vitiates the proper epistemic functioning of the officers as well as their epistemic relationality with inmates. What are the epistemic harms that result from the epistemic vice of incredulity in this case? First, the officers’ incredulity satisfies the lack-of-properepistemic-functioning criterion since it epistemically disables the subjects in question in carrying out epistemic tasks they are supposed to do, such as gathering information about the inmates’ safety and well-being. Moreover, the officers’ incredulity is embedded in a pattern of epistemic self-harm, that is, in the corruption of the officers’ testimonial sensibility, which includes epistemic flaws that accrue as a result of their vicious incredulous attitude, such as the following: their epistemic arrogance and incuriosity, their lack of motivation to find out whether or not the emergency calls are warranted, their epistemic laziness in making no efforts to find out more about the situation, etc.6 In the second place, the officers’ incredulity satisfies the lack-of-proper-epistemic-relationality criterion as well: because of their incredulous attitude with respect to the inmates, they disregarded their emergency calls and this prevented inmates from giving testimony while witnessing Mr. McCain die in front of their very eyes, resulting in epistemic as well as moral and physical harms for the inmates. Following Fricker’s analysis of the different harms of epistemic injustice (2007), let’s distinguish between, on the one hand, the primary (epistemic) harms that occur at the moment of the epistemic interaction, or missed encounter,

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 115 between the inmates and the detention officers before Mr. McCain’s death, and, on the other hand, the secondary (epistemic and non-epistemic) harms that occur as a result of the epistemic neglect. In the first place, the primary and immediate harms that inmates receive at the moment of the epistemic neglect are twofold: first, the epistemic harm of being cut off from effective communication, having their expressive behavior rendered ineffective, so that their knowledge is prevented from being shared and the vital information they possess about Mr. McCain’s critical condition is not circulated; and second, the hybrid, ethico-epistemic harm of receiving no respect as a subject of knowledge, the violation of the dignity of inmates as speaking subjects capable of giving testimony (a deep epistemic and moral harm). In the second place, besides the primary harms that are constitutive of the testimonial injustice suffered by inmates at DCDF, there are also secondary harms that result from the act of epistemic neglect: clear additional harms that are both epistemic and non-epistemic, negative ways in which the epistemic neglect reverberates in other epistemic and non-epistemic transactions in the jail. The secondary epistemic harms that result from the inmates being distrusted and epistemically neglected include the epistemic repercussions that such distrust and neglect have for the inmates’ epistemic agency and character in future interactions, for example, by undermining their epistemic confidence, their capacity to trust, and also by increasing the likelihood of testimonial smothering7 or self-silencing in future interactions with the guards and other jail officials. The secondary non-epistemic harms that result from the inmates’ being distrusted and epistemically neglected include all the non-epistemic consequences that such distrust and neglect have for the inmates’ life in jail: negative psychological consequences such as anxiety, depression, etc.; and negative practical consequences such as an increased vulnerability to being unfairly disciplined and subject to physical harm and injury, including death, as in Mr. McCain’s case.8 Of course, there can be cases of inmates issuing false emergency calls at DCDF, as the detention officers are prompt to point out. But note that even in those cases the policy of Believing Inmates is good epistemic policy and does not result in a problematic credulous attitude or the epistemic vice of gullibility (except perhaps in exceptional contexts in which the frequency of false alarms has become extremely high).9 Note that even in false-emergency-calls cases not following the policy of Believing Inmates and exercising distrust without any grounds will result in epistemic harms. Even in such cases baseless incredulity functions as a capital epistemic vice in my view, because even in such cases the incredulity satisfies both criteria, although the second one only in a very limited way. The satisfaction of the lack-of-proper-epistemic-functioning criterion is clear because, even in these cases, the incredulity epistemically disables the guards in their interaction with the inmates (even if there is no pay-off resulting from those interactions) and is likely to contribute to the corruption of the officers’ testimonial sensibility, incentivizing other epistemic vices such as epistemic arrogance and epistemic laziness. On the other hand, the satisfaction of the lack-of-proper-epistemic-relationality criterion may not be so clear in cases of false emergency calls, but I would

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argue that even in these cases there is a partial satisfaction of the criterion: what we do not have is the primary epistemic harm of obstructing knowledge from being circulated, but what we still do have is the indignity of being treated as a second-class citizen in the epistemic community, the ethico-epistemic harm of being disrespected as a subject of knowledge. Also, in false-emergency-call cases, secondary epistemic and practical harms can still accrue as a result of the ethicoepistemic harm of epistemic neglect.10 So the policy of Believing Inmates is good epistemic policy at least for contexts of communication that concerns matters of life and death such as in responding to emergency calls, for, in such contexts, this policy guarantees proper epistemic functioning and proper epistemic relationality.

6.3 Falling into the abyss of epistemic corruption (II): epistemically corrupted institutions As I pointed out from the beginning, after Mr. McCain’s death by medical and epistemic neglect came to light, under the pressure of the activist organization Inside/Outside Alliance, it was uncovered that there have been multiple similar cases at DCDF in the preceding months and many more in the preceding years. Once we notice that these are not isolated events, we cannot simply attribute the epistemic failings only to the individual epistemic vices of the particular guards on duty in each case. There is in fact a pattern of epistemic neglect at DCDF. In the light of this pattern, we can (and should) move the analysis of epistemic vices from the personal to the institutional level. But how do we establish the presence of a capital epistemic vice in an institution? What counts as institutional epistemic behavior? One way of proceeding is by paying attention to what the institution should have been doing to guarantee the fair epistemic treatment of inmates and to guarantee, as much as possible, that tragic cases like the epistemic neglect of emergency calls do not happen. In this way we can detect the epistemic negligence of the institution itself as setting the stage for specific instances of epistemic neglect in the interaction between inmates and detention officers. To begin with, a carceral institution can and should have protocols that make it impossible for guards to arbitrarily disregard emergency calls, so that as soon as an emergency button is pushed and/or a cry for help is heard, it is required that a guard be immediately sent to check on the alleged emergency and all activities stop until this requirement is fulfilled. And in order to prevent systematic epistemic neglect in different areas of carceral life, institutional protocols that implement a communicative-epistemic policy of taking the expressive behavior of inmates seriously are also needed in non-emergency situations. In particular, protocols are needed for guaranteeing that inmates’ complaints and grievances are properly handled. At DCDF, inmates do have opportunities to file grievances, which is crucial in order to ensure that they have epistemic subjectivity and agency to give testimony about their problems and concerns in carceral life. The problem is that such grievances are rarely properly processed, responded to, and acted on. Protocols and proper procedures are needed here to ensure that inmates’ voices are respected, and their utterances and pronouncements are taken seriously and as

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 117 deserving of trust. Unfortunately, that is not the case at DCDF. As Medina and Whitt’s (forthcoming) analysis of testimonial dysfunctions within DCDF underscores, hundreds of detainee letters collected by Inside-Outside Alliance offer hundreds of examples of jail staff verbally disregarding, minimizing, or dismissing detainee complaints and requests out of hand. They write: A computerized system now enables detainees to file grievances and monitor their status, and this ostensibly makes the grievance process more efficient and transparent. However, the grievances are routed to over one hundred potentially responsible parties, and detainees report that grievances are not resolved, progress is not updated, or that complaints and requests fall into gaps in the system.11 In this way, the computerized system reinforces a socialepistemic context in which detainee voices are systematically disadvantaged within the jail, even as it provides the appearance of technological impartiality and efficiency. (Medina and Whitt forthcoming, my emphasis) Besides instituting and implementing protocols for properly handling grievances, requests, and emergency calls, there are at least two other things a carceral institution should be doing to ensure that the epistemic dignity of inmates is respected and sufficient levels of trust are maintained: the proper training of officers and jail staff to guarantee proper epistemic functioning and proper relationality visà-vis the inmates; and the use of procedures of accountability so that officers and jail staff are held accountable for epistemic mistreatment, that is, so that they face consequences if they unfairly distrust inmates or treat them in epistemically undignified and disrespectful ways. As Medina and Whitt’s analysis of testimonial dysfunctions at DCDF shows, “correctional officers are explicitly and implicitly trained to not trust, fraternize with, or empathize with incarcerated persons.” The institution lacks training processes that foster empathy, unprejudiced attitudes, and good listening habits. Carceral institutions should work with psychologists and educational experts who can help them to design training aimed at mitigating or bypassing the influence of prejudices. Carceral institutions should also consult with formerly incarcerated subjects in designing training practices so that their perspectives and vulnerabilities as subjects of knowledge under the care and protection of the institution are taken into account and properly addressed. It would serve carceral institutions well to pay particular attention in the design of their training practices to especially vulnerable populations within the criminal justice system of the US such as AfricanAmericans and Latinos who are disproportionately incarcerated and mistreated within the prison system (see esp. Rios 2011). In this essay I have not focused on race/racism as a key factor in the epistemic mistreatment of incarcerated subjects, but, although the prejudices and stigmatizations concerning criminality affect all incarcerated subjects, they do not affect them all equally, and inmates of color are more vulnerable to epistemic disrespect and unfair distrust based on prejudicial and stigmatizing ways of thinking—it is indeed not accidental that Mr. McCain as

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well as many of those who have died at DCDF by epistemic and medical neglect were African-American. Finally, the best protocols for proper epistemic functioning and proper epistemic relationality will be ineffective if officers and jail staff are not held accountable when they violate these protocols, and the best training for instilling healthy epistemic attitudes and habits will be ineffective if officers and jail staff do not act in consequence with their training and their contravening the training has no consequences. A carceral institutional commitment to a communicative-epistemic policy of taking inmates’ words and expressive behavior seriously requires clear accountability procedures that are made known to officers and jail staff and are conscientiously followed to guarantee that infringing the institution’s expectations about epistemic respect for inmates and proper epistemic treatment cannot happen with impunity. The three institutional deficiencies I have highlighted—the lack of adequate protocols, of proper training, and of accountability procedures—clearly demonstrate that the institution has failed to take proactive steps to guarantee that the inmates’ expressive behavior is taken seriously and trusted as a matter of communicative-epistemic policy.12 The institution exhibits the epistemic vice of incredulity with respect to the inmates since it has not instituted the default attitude of trusting inmates unless evidence to the contrary surfaces. And the epistemic vice can be ascribed to the institution on the basis of these failures alone and independently of actual patterns of distrust exhibited by officers on the grounds. Note that the epistemic vice of unfairly distrusting inmates can be attributed to the institution even when there is no pattern of epistemic mistreatment of inmates that can be detected over time by the accumulation of cases. For example, think of the following counterfactual scenario, which is different from DCDF and other crowded county jails: a jail with so few inmates and with such a quick turn-around that inmates are processed in and out of the facilities without there being much of a chance for a pattern of epistemic neglect to be formed and clearly exhibited. Still, the epistemic vice can be counterfactually attributed to the jail as a carceral institution given its lack of protocols, training, and accountability procedures to prevent epistemic neglect from occurring. A single instance of epistemic neglect in this scenario is likely to be attributed to the flawed detention officers on the grounds, but, in fact, it is already a systemic problem because of the absence of adequate protocols, training, and accountability procedures. By lacking a communicative-epistemic policy of taking inmates’ voices seriously and systematically failing to instill and demand healthy trusting attitudes and habits, the county jail can be said to exhibit an institutional attitude of unwarranted distrust and incredulity with respect to the inmates, and this vicious epistemic attitude does satisfy the two criteria I laid out for counting as a capital epistemic vice. On the one hand, the lack of epistemic proper functioning clearly happens at the institutional level: DCDF, as an institution, does not treat inmates as trustworthy in their grievances, requests, and emergency calls, and therefore becomes epistemically ill-equipped to carry out properly basic epistemic

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 119 operations required for providing care and protection for the inmates. It is not only an individual failure of the particular jail officers and administrators whom these grievances, requests, and emergency calls happen to reach, but also a failure of the institutional set-up that makes proper epistemic uptake unlikely or a matter of luck. As a result, DCDF itself, as an institution, and not only its officers and staff, fails to respect inmates as subjects of knowledge and to establish a proper epistemic relationality with them. Therefore, the institutional vice of incredulity can also be deemed capital according to the second criterion. But where is this institutional, capital vice of incredulity grounded? A carceral institution that does not have adequate communicative-epistemic policies of listening to and trusting its inmates is likely to harbor not only misplaced disinterest and distrust, but also a prejudicial mindset, that is, to harbor not only vicious attitudes but also a vicious way of thinking. The prejudicial and stigmatizing way of thinking that depicts inmates as intrinsically untrustworthy can also operate as a capital epistemic vice of both the officers and the institution. But although a lot has been written on the prejudices and stigmas of criminality as they operate in the American criminal justice system and how they make detained and incarcerated people—and especially people of color—vulnerable to mistreatments of all sorts (epistemic and non-epistemic), the epistemic vice of employing a prejudicial and stigmatizing way of thinking is more elusive and more difficult to prove or confirm with clear evidence than the epistemic vice of incredulity. For this reason, I have bracketed the trickier issue of the possibly prejudicial and stigmatizing way of thinking exhibited in the institutional behavior of DCDF, and I have focused on the issue of the institutional incredulous attitude towards inmates and the capital institutional epistemic vice this attitude amounts to. My elucidations here offer only the preliminary steps for a full analysis of the institutional epistemic vices involved in cases of neglect in the criminal justice system.

6.4 Fighting capital epistemic vices: resisting and preventing deep epistemic corruption As Fricker (2010) has suggested, there are “basic institutional virtues” that we should expect all public institutions to exhibit because “they are of fundamental importance to the legitimacy of the polity in general,” and, Fricker goes on to say, “institutional virtues of epistemic justice, most notably the virtue of testimonial justice, are basic in this sense” (2010: 250). By the same token, we can also say that the institutional vices of epistemic injustice—and of testimonial injustice in particular—should be thought of as “basic” vices with a particular kind of centrality for public life and for the epistemic life of institutions. Building on this insight and going beyond it, in this essay I have examined some of the different vices that may be contained within the broader vice of testimonial injustice and I have laid out epistemic criteria that can allow us to draw a distinction between capital and venial epistemic vices, so that we identify those capital vices that are at the core of processes of epistemic corruption both for subjects and for institutions. With

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an obstructionist view of epistemic vice in the background, the motivation for providing a finer-grained diagnostics of epistemic vices—and of the epistemic vices of testimonial injustice in particular—was to be able to offer some guidance for corrective and reparative practices, that is, to be able to identify the epistemic vices that were most damaging, with the most harmful consequences, and therefore capital, so that they could be addressed first; and by resisting them first, we could stop the epistemic bleeding—so to speak—where it was most needed, giving priority to the prevention of the most nefarious harms and trying to halt the process of epistemic corruption at its foundations. In my previous work I have tried to shed light on struggles against epistemic oppression and marginalization and efforts to fight against epistemic corruption by elucidating what I call epistemic resistance (Medina 2013). In my most recent work, I have elucidated our concerted efforts at epistemic resistance on the ground as practices of epistemic activism (Medina 2018, Medina and Whitt forthcoming). What are the forms of epistemic resistance and the forms of epistemic activism that need to be mobilized to correct and repair capital epistemic vices that are creating fatal epistemic dysfunctions at DCDF? Here we have to identify practices of epistemic activism that will lead to interventions and transformations that will improve both interpersonal testimonial sensibilities and institutional epistemic policies and designs. As explained by Medina and Whitt (forthcoming), we can think of epistemic activism as concerted efforts and interventions in epistemic practices that aim to “augment the epistemic agency of unfairly disadvantaged subjects, amplifying their voices and facilitating the development and exercise of their epistemic capacities.” Epistemic activism can take many different shapes and forms. Its strategies and tactics will be dictated by who engages in it, in what contexts, and against what patterns of interaction and institutional frameworks. Differently situated subjects, both oppressed and non-oppressed subjects, can become epistemic activists. “Oppressed subjects can become epistemic activists—sometimes by necessity if not by choice—when they actively fight against their epistemic marginalization and work towards forms of self-empowerment that can achieve the epistemic agency they are unjustly denied” (ibid.). Within carceral contexts, inmates themselves can (and often do) become epistemic activists by denouncing and trying to resist unfair patterns of epistemic neglect, and by expressing epistemic solidarity by backing up one another’s testimonies, so that they mitigate the harmful consequences that individual acts of protest typically encounter. A good example of epistemic activism cultivated by jail inmates at DCDF is provided by Medina and Whitt: At DCDF an unknown number of detainees recently organized the “First Five Grieving Committee,” a “non-violent” and “non-gang affiliated” cooperative that anonymizes and amplifies the grievances of individual detainees. By working together, the members of the Committee have successfully directed their concerns to the Durham County Sheriff, whereas individual grievances are typically heard—if they are heard at all—by subordinate staff members.

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 121 This is an instance of epistemic activism, within the context of the jail, starting to ameliorate the testimonial disadvantage that detainees face. (Medina and Whitt forthcoming) Not only oppressed subjects but also their allies can engage in epistemic activism. In cases of epistemic neglect within carceral contexts, “activists, scholars and journalists, family members, political leaders, social media participants, and in short the general public can join forces with jail detainees to help ensure that their voices are heard, and their concerns are addressed” (Medina and Whitt forthcoming). I want to pay special attention here to the work of epistemic resistance of the Inside-Outside Alliance (hereafter IOA), a local activist organization that describes itself as “a group of people trying to support the struggles of those inside (or formerly inside) Durham County jail, and their families and friends.”13 IOA members—friends and family of incarcerated subjects, formerly incarcerated subjects, and activists—engage in epistemic interventions, programs, and initiatives, which they subsume under the heading Amplify Voices Inside. There are two kinds of interventions in the epistemic activism of IOA that I want to highlight: epistemic resistance inside the jail and epistemic resistance outside the jail. In the first place, IOA members use their voices and epistemic agency within the jail itself to echo, support, and empower the neglected voices of inmates and to put pressure on DCDF and its workers to meliorate their dynamics and policies. Think of cases of epistemic neglect of inmates’ grievances. Detainees often complain that their unaddressed grievances disappear in the system, and when these grievances have been especially urgent, they have worked with IOA members to put external pressure on jail administrators. In November 2014, the activist group organized call-ins to overwhelm administrators’ phone lines when evening meals were reduced to two cold sandwiches. They adopted similar tactics in September 2015, when jail staff would not grant emergency medical transfer to a detainee in severe pain. In these actions, phone calls from diverse community members—many of whom do not consider themselves to be “activists”— echoed detainee grievances in ways that made them more difficult to disregard or disbelieve. Additionally, the phone calls reminded jail staff of their accountability to the local community. In these ways, the actions temporarily disrupted typical patterns of interaction inside and outside of the jail, and indicated the possibility for alternative, less dysfunctional patterns. For alternative patterns to take hold, however, it may take repeated activist interventions. (Medina and Whitt forthcoming, my emphasis) What this epistemic activism can achieve is the (at least temporary) interruption of dysfunctional dynamics of epistemic neglect, making it difficult (at least temporarily) for detention officers and jail staff to act on epistemic vices (such as incredulity) that rise to the level of capital vices. The epistemic resistance of IOA members by itself will not create fair epistemic dynamics, but it can help trigger

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a process of amelioration of testimonial dynamics and it puts pressure on individuals and institutions to discontinue epistemic vices and improve testimonial sensibilities. In the second place, IOA’s epistemic activism also takes place outside the county jail in their attempts to procure epistemic standing for inmates’ perspectives and some degrees of epistemic agency for their voices in the outside world. As Medina and Whitt put it, detainees’ voices rarely reach places of political authority without being distorted, translated into other idioms or discourses, or ventriloquized by others. For this reason, it is important to have forms of epistemic activism in which outside allies lend their voices as instruments or extensions of the detainees’ own, without interpreting or translating them. IOA members do this “by reading detainees’ letters in City Council meetings and County Commissioner meetings, disrupting ‘business as usual’ with the testimonies of individuals who have been excluded from the sites of official power.” Other ways in which IOA members seek to amplify detainee voices include: “publishing their letters verbatim, usually without context or commentary, on the website Amplify Voices Inside”; and publishing “detainee letters and artwork in a print magazine called Feedback” (ibid.). In these different ways IOA members try to ensure that the voices of inmates are heard in the outside world and their stories, problems, and concerns neglected inside the jail can reach other institutions and authorities as well as the general public. Epistemic activism against epistemic corruption and capital epistemic vices is much more than consciousness-raising; it is an attempt to meliorate epistemic dynamics and institutional frameworks so that capital epistemic vices are uprooted and the work towards epistemic justice can begin. In carceral contexts, this work of epistemic resistance needs to happen both at the level of interpersonal dynamics, targeting the testimonial insensitivity of carceral workers, and at the level of the institution itself, targeting the epistemic vices of the institutional structure in its protocols and procedures or lack thereof. The activist interventions of IOA I have highlighted show clear ways in which the epistemic attitudes and habits of guards and jail staff are put under pressure to change and improve by becoming accountable to outside publics and authorities. But they also have to become accountable within the institutional framework of the jail itself, and this calls not only for a melioration of the testimonial sensibility of the officers on the grounds, but also for institutional transformations that result in in-house accountability as well as in new protocols and training procedures. Individual and institutional capital epistemic vices work in tandem and feed each other, and corrective and reparative practices of epistemic pathologies need to take both interpersonal and institutional measures because both interpersonal dynamics and institutional frameworks need to be meliorated simultaneously. Solutions or corrective measures that are purely interpersonal or purely institutional are doomed to fail. Purely interpersonal correctives disregard the

Capital vices and epistemic neglect 123 institutional aspects of the dysfunction and assume that more epistemically just institutions will emerge as a by-product of interpersonal epistemic meliorations. On the other hand, purely institutional correctives by themselves are also insufficient, for they disregard the interpersonal aspects of the dysfunction and assume that more epistemically just interpersonal dynamics will emerge as a by-product of institutional epistemic meliorations. Both of these approaches are misguided. We need a hybrid approach that is both interpersonal and institutional. The epistemic activism I have elucidated in this section gives a good illustration of how to target both institutional epistemic vices and vicious interpersonal dynamics simultaneously. It is important to emphasize that the work of epistemic resistance and the eradication of capital epistemic vices require not simply activist interventions, but constant, sustained efforts in the perfectionist struggle toward epistemic virtue and fair epistemic dynamics within institutional frameworks. In a carceral institution such as DCDF, this epistemic perfectionism has to be constantly cultivated in the three areas of institutional design and practice I have highlighted. First, it is not enough to institute adequate protocols, but it is also necessary to use assessment processes for the revision of these protocols and to engage in sustained efforts toward changing the institutional culture and institutional values so that inmates’ voices and perspectives are respected and treated fairly. Second, a carceral institution such as DCDF needs to provide not only adequate training, but also constant re-training, which is crucial not only to address the epistemic flaws and failings of workers who are already in the institution, as opposed to newcomers, but also for revisiting and continuing the epistemic melioration of attitudes, habits, and dynamics initiated in the training process, since no training practice will be able to guarantee once and for all that epistemic vices will not set in. Third, the institution needs not only to have adequate accountability procedures, but also to follow them conscientiously so as to ensure that protocols are followed, that the received training and re-training are incorporated in daily epistemic interactions, and that the institutional culture and values operate properly in the embodied sensibility of people on the grounds. In this chapter, I have offered a preliminary analysis of capital epistemic vices that can afflict both subjects and institutions by laying out two criteria to identify such vices and by applying the analysis to a specific case of capital testimonial injustice in a carceral institution. This provides only the first step towards future work on the diagnostics of capital epistemic vices and, more importantly, on the reparative and corrective practices needed to eradicate them.

Notes 1 Needless to say, incredulity is not always an epistemic vice: in the fable of the boy who cried wolf, the farmers who ignored the boy the third time are not epistemically vicious for doing so. Here context is everything, and there are indeed contexts in which incredulity can be epistemically defensible, depending on what has happened in the past. 2 Matters of life and death raise the bar extremely high for judgments about the admissibility or advisability of incredulity. But even here there could be contexts in which

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incredulity may not be an epistemic failing. As Quassim Cassam has pointed out to me in personal correspondence, it is not epistemically vicious to ignore a fire alarm when it tends to malfunction and systematically goes off without there being a fire, even though a building fire is potentially a matter of life and death. The number of false alarms and the evidence available about the malfunction are indeed crucial considerations in this case for assessing the admissibility and advisability of incredulity. See Cacho (2012) and Rios (2011). See also Medina and Whitt (forthcoming) for how this can be detected at DCDF in particular. Ian James Kidd (2017) has introduced the concept of capital epistemic vices. I draw inspiration from his remarks in personal correspondence, but I develop the distinction in this essay in my own way. I am using “guilt” and “blameworthiness” here in a loose way to allude to the responsibility of a subject or an institution for the vices they harbor. But it may advisable to focus on criticizability (rather than culpability) as the most apt normative category, as Cassam (2019) has argued. One may wonder why I want to highlight the vicious epistemic attitude of incredulity and not one of the other flaws, such as incuriosity or epistemic laziness. Acknowledging that these other flaws are also capital epistemic vices in this case would not be a problem for my analysis, but I want to give center-stage to incredulity in this case because the other flaws work in tandem with incredulity but not independently, whereas incredulity does not seem to require that the other flaws be already there prior to the incredulous attitude (e.g. it does seem necessary that the officers be already epistemically lazy prior to succumbing to incredulity). But in the case under examination the attitude of incredulity may not work fully independently of all other epistemic vices; in particular, the incredulity of DCDF officers seems to be the product of a vicious way of thinking: a prejudicial and stigmatizing mindset that depicts inmates as intrinsically untrustworthy. I will comment on the connection between the vicious attitude of incredulity and the prejudicial way of thinking of a stigmatizing carceral logic later in the chapter. See Dotson (2011). Needless to say, in this context, deeming a harm secondary does not mean that it is less important, but only that it does not happen immediately at the moment of the epistemic interaction in question, but rather as a result of it. The epistemic neglect of the emergency calls by detention officers at DCDF contributed to the eventual death of Mr. McCain in January 2016, but Mr. McCain’s death is not a direct and immediate consequence of such neglect. See endnotes 1–2 for a brief discussion of this important qualification. Note that there could be, of course, different kinds of cases that depart from the cases of epistemic neglect by incredulity that I am describing. In particular, there can be scenarios of ethical neglect in which the emergency calls of inmates could be disregarded by guards not out of incredulity but out of lack of care (for example, cases in which the guards and/or the carceral institution itself do not see inmates as truly deserving of basic protections and medical care). These cases will not include the indignity of being considered intrinsically untrustworthy, that is, the primary harm of being disrespected as a subject of knowledge capable of giving reliable testimony. Durham Jail Investigation Team, “Initial Report of Grievances, Rules, Backgrounder,” internal report prepared May 2016, and “Durham Jail Investigation Team Infopack for Human Relations Commission,” report prepared September 2016. Both reports are based on Durham County public records, detainee letters, news coverage, and information provided by DCDF Public Information Officers. Available upon request. This is what activist organizations such as IOA seem to be demanding with the slogan Believing Prisoners. Such a slogan highlights the need for a communicative-epistemic policy of giving proper uptake to prisoners and taking their words (or communicative attempts) seriously and (in principle) as worthy of belief. See www.amplifyvoices.com.

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References Cacho, Lisa M. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press. Cassam, Quassim. 2019. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2010. “Can There Be Institutional Virtues?” In T. Szabo Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 3: Social Epistemology. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 235–252. Kidd, Ian James. 2017. “Capital Epistemic Vices.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (8): 11–16. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Medina, José. 2018. “Resisting Racist Propaganda: Distorted Visual Communication and Epistemic Activism.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56: 50–75. Medina, José, and Whitt, Matt. Forthcoming. “Epistemic Activism and the Politics of Credibility: Testimonial Injustice Inside/Outside a North Carolina Jail.” In Nancy McHugh and Heidi Grasswick (eds.), Making the Case. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rios, Victor. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press.

7

Implicit bias and epistemic vice Jules Holroyd

Can implicit biases be properly thought of as epistemic vices? I start by sketching the contours of implicit biases (Section 7.1), and then turn to the recent claim, from Cassam, that implicit biases are epistemic vices (Section 7.2). However, I argue that concerns about the stability of implicit biases and their role in producing behavior make for difficulties in establishing that implicit biases of individuals are epistemic vices (Section 7.3). I then consider a recently developed model which prompts us to consider implicit biases as properties of groups (Section 7.4). This raises the question of whether implicit biases might constitute collective epistemic vice. I suggest that there is a way to make sense of this claim, but it requires rethinking how we conceptualize collective epistemic vice (Section 7.5). These re-conceptualizations can be independently motivated. I close by marshaling some considerations in favor of using the terminology of vice to capture these defects of collective epistemic practice (Section 7.6).

7.1 What are implicit biases? Implicit biases are heterogeneous phenomena. Authors tend to point to various features that implicit biases share: they operate quickly and automatically, they may be difficult for the agent to control or be aware of, they may be arational or limited in the extent to which they are guided by the norms that govern other mental states. Biases may differ in the extent to which they manifest each of these characteristics. There are different kinds of biases, that appear to operate in different ways, and may be differently related to individuals’ other attitudes, motives, and beliefs. Different biases are related to different kinds of behavior. For example, some biases might affect judgments (how competent another is); others might affect one’s manner (e.g. how friendly one is). Exactly how we should characterize implicit biases is contentious, and not a matter that needs to be settled here (see Holroyd 2016 for an overview and critique of various ways of conceiving implicit biases). The manifestation of implicit biases in behavior is also a complex phenomenon. Certain patterns of implicit biases have been pervasively found in large-scale studies that use implicit measures to access biases on which people are unable or unwilling to report: biases against women, black people, minority ethnicity

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 127 individuals, and other socially stigmatized groups. This is unsurprising, given the interaction between our cognitions and background patterns of social inequality and injustice (see Madva 2016 for discussion of how to understand this interaction). Moreover, that implicit biases are found to be pervasive resonates with reports of discrimination as persistent and pervasive from those who experience it (see e.g. Williams, 2014; Valian, 2005, Sue et al. 2008). The pervasiveness with which biases are found has led some to posit implicit biases as important explanatory factors in understanding persisting patterns of exclusion and discrimination (Greenwald et al. 2015). If very many people, even only occasionally, behave in ways that express implicit bias, a pattern of discriminatory judgment and behavior could emerge, with exclusionary consequences.1 Next, I introduce some particular kinds of associations, and the sorts of behaviors in which we might find these biases expressed. Implicit gender bias and judgments of competence or leadership: various studies indicate gender bias in the evaluation of CVs, whereby women’s CVs are judged to demonstrate less competence, or merit lower pay grades, than commensurate CVs of male counterparts (Bertrand et al. 2005; Moss-Racusin et al. 2012). Studies have also shown that women are more strongly associated with notions to do with the family than with career-oriented notions (with which men are associated) (Rudman & Kilianski 2000), and that women are less strongly associated with leadership roles than men (Valian 2005).2 At issue here, then, are the associations themselves (between women and family or supporting roles, men and career or leadership roles) and behaviors that appear to be underpinned by implicit biases: judgments of lesser competence, and lesser recognition, or undervaluing, of women’s achievements. When women are viewed through the lens of stereotypes, or judged to be less professionally competent, or to have less intellectual acumen or leadership, due to implicit bias, should we think that those who make these judgments display an epistemic vice? It can be difficult to reach any evaluations or judgments of agents for their performance on implicit measures in laboratory contexts – not least because biases may be visible in these contexts because all else is held fixed (in a way that is rarely the case in ‘real-world’ scenarios). So it will be helpful to have in mind a real-world example. Implicit bias outside the lab: the following scenario is anonymously reported on the ‘What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?’ blog: I was at a bar with three colleagues, each of whom are a) male, b) my friends, and c) self-identified feminists. So there were four philosophers in a bar, at a 3:1 male-to-female ratio. The table was discussing a book that only half in attendance had actually read. Now, I was one of the two folks who had read the book. It should surprise you, then, to learn that for the life of me, I could not get a word in edgewise! 3/4 people were talking, and only 1/3 of those speaking had read the book under discussion, but every freakin’ time I tried to speak, I was summarily shut down, talked over, and/or ignored … I was disheartened and sad to be treated this way by my friends. I picked up my

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Jules Holroyd phone, only to find that it was out of batteries, and tossed it back down on the table, frustratedly. One colleague took notice of my frustration and asked what was the matter, to which I responded rather directly, “Well there is nothing else for me to do at this table, and now my phone is out of batteries.” His response? “That sucks. So anyway, how was your weekend with [my partner]?” Shocked and appalled by this totally unnatural segue, I retorted, “We don’t have to stop talking about philosophy!” [implying of course: just because you’re going to include me, now.] Totally unawares, he sincerely replied, “No! I really wanted to know how your weekend was!” He didn’t even realize what he had done … All three of these guys are my friends, they are self-identified feminists, and they take themselves to be good allies. I’ll bet if I told this story back to them in another context, all three of those guys would be appalled. But from the inside, they had no idea what they were doing.3

Of course, since implicit measures (or measures of any kind) were not used in this case, we cannot know that implicit biases were at work here. But let us interpret the case on the plausible assumption that this is an instance in which implicit bias is driving the behavior. This seems credible if we accept that the author is accurate in her judgment that her colleagues are friends, feminists, and would-be allies. They do not subscribe to the belief that ‘women have nothing of value to contribute to philosophical discussions’, say; when they are dismissive of her contributions, they seem not to intend to devalue her, nor to realize that this is what they are doing. It is not a stretch to explain such behavior in terms of implicit associations between women and family (rather than career) – especially given their willingness to include her in a discussion about her relationship! – or tendencies to evaluate women as less competent, or to undervalue women’s contributions. Such behavior may be influenced by implicit associations such as those manifested in the studies described above. Insofar as such behavior expresses implicit gender biases, are the philosophers who so behave displaying an epistemic vice?

7.2 The prima facie case for implicit biases as intellectual vices In this section, I outline the contours of Cassam’s recent claim that implicit biases are epistemic vices.4 7.2.1 Bias impedes knowledge On Cassam’s ‘obstructivist’ account of epistemic vice (2016 and developed in his 2019): OBS: an epistemic vice is a blameworthy or otherwise reprehensible character trait, attitude, or way of thinking that systematically obstructs the gaining, keeping, or sharing of knowledge. (2019, 23)

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 129 For example, gullibility is an intellectual vice because it is a trait that hinders responsible knowledge acquisition, leading the inquirer to rely on unreliable sources and leap to unsupported conclusions. This analysis of epistemic vice is helpfully expansive, taking in not only traits, but also attitudes or ways of thinking. Cassam is also explicit that cognitive biases, including implicit biases, may also be candidates for epistemic vice. Drawing on the idea (from Banaji & Greenwald, 2016) that implicit biases are ‘habits of thought’ Cassam argues that implicit biases can be understood as epistemically harmful attitudes (2019, 168– 173). The cases on which he focuses are those of weapons biases: the tendency to misperceive items as weapons when primed with black faces (Payne 2006). Such biases are implicated in potentially lethal harms (such as racist patterns of police shootings), as well as epistemic harms (impeding perceptual knowledge). Implicit biases of this sort, and the kind we considered above, seem clearly reprehensible – that is, criticizable – and Cassam makes the case that such biases are blameworthy insofar as agents are what he calls ‘revision responsible’ for them – that is, if we have the control to weaken or rid ourselves of such biases.5 Since there is reason to suppose that biases are to some degree malleable, and can be weakened by various forms of self-manipulation (see Holroyd & Kelly 2016), this, together with their obstructive role in inquiry, would suffice on Cassam’s account, to make implicit biases epistemic vices. Our examples (from Section 7.1) might be thought to add plausibility to this claim: in experimental studies, gender biases hinder knowledge about the competences and value of women, and knowledge sharing is certainly impeded by the gender biases of the colleagues involved in the ‘What is it like…?’ example. However, I want to flag the following issue now, to which I will return (in Section 7.3, below): namely, the requirement, in OBS, that vices systematically obstruct knowledge. This claim might pose difficulties for the obstructivist’s contention that implicit biases in individuals are epistemic vices. 7.2.2 Other conceptions of epistemic vice Cassam’s conception of epistemic vice is not the only one. An alternative view has it that ‘vices will be qualities that reliably produce the bad’ (Battaly, 2014, 56). For epistemic vices, the bads at issue will, paradigmatically, be false beliefs. On this conception (the reliabilist conception of vice (see also Battaly 2015), a trait or mode of thinking – be it hard-wired or acquired – is vicious if it reliably produces bad effects or outcomes. This relation to bad effects is necessary and sufficient for a quality to be a vice (2014, 57). Battaly also sketches a ‘responsibilist’ conception of vice. This view focuses on the blameworthy psychology of the agent: ‘bad motives, false conceptions of the good, dispositions to perform bad actions … are required for vice’ (2014, 62). This view – the responsibilist view – is driven by the thought that vices are those aspects of our character that are within our control. Another intuition supporting responsibilism is that what matters is that our character expresses what we care about and value (62). I introduce these views to note that Cassam’s is

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not the only conception on which a case might be made for implicit biases as vices. Implicit biases may produce bad epistemic effects (false beliefs), or may be rooted in blameworthy psychologies (see e.g. Holroyd 2012, Holroyd & Kelly 2016, Brownstein 2016).6 One might think that these alternative conceptions, like Cassam’s, could also accommodate the claims that implicit biases are epistemic vices. However, these accounts commit to the view that implicit biases should reliably produce bad effects, or are stable traits of the agent. In the next section, I argue these requirements (like that of systematic obstruction of knowledge) pose difficulties for establishing that implicit biases, in individuals, are epistemic vices.

7.3 The challenges 7.3.1 Predictive validity Does an individual’s implicit bias systematically obstruct inquiry or reliably produce false beliefs (or other epistemic bads)? To systematically impede inquiry, bias need not invariably do so. Cassam rather follows Driver (2001) in requiring rather that the connection between the vice and the bad epistemic outcome be ‘non-accidental’ (2019, 11). This is intended to rule out cases where luck plays a role: ‘to make room for the possibility that epistemic vice can have unexpected effects in particular cases’ (12). For example, if an implicit bias occasionally and unexpectedly promoted, rather than obstructed, knowledge that need not undermine its putative status as a vice. But what is meant by ‘non-accidental’, precisely? In a useful footnote, Cassam asks what we might think of counterfactual scenarios in which something we presently consider a virtue (open-mindedness) ‘normally gets in the way of knowledge’ (fn 25 at p.12, my italics). So our question is whether an individual’s implicit biases systematically, that is, normally, or in the usual run of things (without luck or causal deviance), obstruct knowledge. Recent meta-analyses examining the relationship between individuals’ implicit biases and behavioral outcomes are highly pertinent to this issue. Greenwald et al. (2015), in their defense of implicit measures, examine the ‘predictive validity’ of individuals’ implicit biases: namely, the extent to which how an individual performs on an implicit measure enables us to predict how they will behave (the correlation between biases and certain behaviors). They point out that the predictive validity of the IAT is what psychologists would call ‘low’7 – that is, an individual’s score on an Implicit Association Test (e.g. whether they have associations between women/family and men/career-related notions) does not allow us to predict with confidence how that individual will behave towards women. They take this to be perfectly consistent with their defense of implicit measures – and I return to this shortly – but the point for now is that it problematizes the claim that an individual’s implicit bias will be systematically obstructive of inquiry, or a reliable producer of bad effects. That implicit biases are poor predictors of behavior suggests that they don’t normally, in the usual run of things, produce such bad effects. Occasionally they do, but often they do not (producing neutral

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 131 or non-discriminatory behavior). Note that the bad effects at issue include both behaviors, e.g. how far away an individual might sit from the target of the bias, and judgments, e.g. of competence or value. The latter concerns whether knowledge (accurate judgment) is promoted or obstructed: bad epistemic effects. The issue is simply that, whilst implicit biases might be pervasive, they aren’t particularly good predictors of whether individuals will behave in discriminatory or knowledge obstructing ways. That is to say, in many instances in which we find an individual harbors an implicit bias, we don’t find a strong relationship to such behaviors.8 There are various ways in which this issue might be addressed: the first would be to appeal to Cassam’s distinction (2019: 58–68) between a character vice – possessed by a person – and a thinking vice – a vicious way of thinking that can be displayed on occasion even by those who do not have the related character vice. One could on occasion be, e.g. closed-minded, thereby displaying a thinking vice, without being a closed-minded person in general. This could enable us to say that implicit biases are thinking vices: when that mode of thinking is displayed, it obstructs inquiry or produces false beliefs.9 However, it is not clear that this deals with the problem. Consider the distinction between the presence of an implicit association in an agent’s mental economy (e.g. between women and family-oriented notions), and the activation and use of that association in a particular deliberative episode (biased thinking). The metaanalyses don’t directly address this issue, but since they concern how individuals perform on an implicit measure (which activates a bias) and their subsequent performance on some behavioral measure, there is reason to believe that they concern episodes of biased thinking. So the meta-analyses should also lead us to conclude that biased thinking weakly correlates with behavioral outcomes. That is, whilst an individual may engage in episodes of biased thinking (they might make associations between men and career, and women and family, or might automatically undervalue the qualifications of women), these thoughts may be overridden by other, non-biased aspects of their deliberative processes. The systematic – normal, in the usual run of things – relationship between episodes of biased thinking and biased behavior also faces the challenge from predictive validity. A second option might be to consider implicit bias as a low-fidelity, rather than high-fidelity vice (Alfano, 2013, 31–32, discussed in Cassam 2019, 32–34). Highfidelity traits, Cassam suggests, require near perfect consistency: one is not generous unless one behaves generously quite consistently. But many ordinary vices, he suggests, are low-fidelity: occasional expression suffices for the vice. One doesn’t have to be consistently cruel to be cruel: one episode suffices. Would bias best be construed as a low- or high-fidelity vice? Are only those who behave in biased ways on a regular basis displaying the vice of bias, or is a one-off instance of bias sufficient for someone to qualify as vicious (as is plausibly the case for, e.g. vicious cruelty)? Whilst Cassam argues that many ordinary vices are low-fidelity, I am inclined to think that bias is akin to closed-mindedness, which Cassam characterizes as a high-fidelity vice. An individual who is generally open-minded, but has a domain

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in which they display closed-mindedness, seems not to have the vice of closedmindedness – that domain is one in which they behave in out-of-character ways. Likewise with bias: an individual who on occasion displays biased thinking need not have the vice of bias – they in this instance behave in a biased way, which is out of character. Consider this issue of predictive validity in light of the example from the ‘What is it like…?’ blog. We might reasonably infer that the behavior of the author’s colleagues is not routine for them: were that the case, it is perhaps unlikely that the author would describe them as friends, much less feminist allies. Rather, the incident is notable, we can infer, because even friends and card-carrying feminists might on occasion manifest implicit biases. As emphasized by researchers on implicit bias, such biases are pervasive and all of us are at risk of, on occasion, manifesting bias in behavior.10 Implicit biases in an individual’s mental economy don’t appear to produce the relevant (bad) consequences with the required systematicity to establish them as epistemic vices. So it is not clear we can establish the conclusion that implicit bias systematically or reliably impedes inquiry or produces false belief; it is not clear that implicit bias is an epistemic vice.11 How do those who defend the explanatory importance of implicit biases in understanding discrimination deal with the issue of predictive validity? Greenwald et al. (2015) maintain that implicit biases are significant, despite their low predictive validity, by pointing to the cumulative effects of implicit biases when they are manifested, even just occasionally, by very many people. Using statistical modeling they show that across a large number of people, implicit biases that correlate weakly with individual behaviors could nonetheless manifest in significant behavioral outcomes across the group as a whole. This suggests that we might do better to consider the phenomenon of implicit biases at the level of groups. Before considering this option, let us turn to the other consideration: whether implicit biases might be thought of as stable traits. 7.3.2 Stability One might endorse a conception of vice where what matters is that the vices are stable character traits. The issue of the stability of implicit biases has been hotly contested in recent writings. This contention rests on the fact that implicit measures – such as those mentioned in Section 7.1 above – have been found to have low test-retest reliability. That is to say, as Gawronski puts it ‘a person’s score on an implicit measure today provides limited information about this person’s score on the same measure at a later time’ (2019, 583). This is not what would be expected if the measures tracked an individuals’ stably expressed traits.12 So, some have concluded that the measures instead access rather more transient states of the agent: what happens to be in mind at a particular time: ‘the momentary activation of associations in memory’ (Gawronski, 583). If that is the case, then it puts pressure on the idea that implicit biases – as measured by the sorts of tests described in Section 7.1 – are vices. A ‘momentary activation’ is certainly not a

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 133 stable trait, which would pose a challenge for accounts according to which epistemic vices should be stable traits.13 A competing interpretation of test-retest reliability findings is to acknowledge that what individuals have in mind on any one occasion is of course dependent on contextual factors, such that it is no surprise to find that across a range of contexts, the extent to which an individual expresses bias on an implicit measure varies. It is after all well-known that implicit biases are malleable: they are highly sensitive to features of the context. This has to do both with the person and their situation. Regarding the person, how tired or distracted they are, on any particular occasion, affects how susceptible individuals are to implicitly biased modes of thinking. And context takes in features of the situation: with whom one is interacting, what exemplars from different social groups are encountered (stereotypical or counterstereotypical) (see Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004), the environment in which a person is encountered, what pressures from social norms are exerted, and so on. We store a rather complex set of information, which can include problematic stereotypes and evaluations; which subset of that stored information is activated depends on the context (see Gawronski 2019). This way of interpreting the findings about test-retest reliability somewhat vindicates the implicit measures: it is not surprising that there is relatively low test-retest reliability. But it still poses a challenge to the idea that implicit biases are stable features of individuals that qualify as character traits in the way the responsibilist requires.14 Consider again the ‘What is it like…?’ example. For all we know, the colleagues in this scenario have varying results on implicit measures (this is likely, if they are in keeping with much of the population). And, as noted, to the extent that they display implicit bias here, this seems noteworthy because it is not in keeping with the rest of their characters. They may display implicit biases, but they do not appear to evince a stable character trait in doing so. This poses difficulties for any account of vice according to which it is a stable trait. I have suggested that the recent analyses showing the low predictive validity of implicit biases, and the low test-retest reliability of measures of implicit biases, puts pressure on the idea that implicit biases could constitute epistemic vices in individuals. However, these concerns should not lead us to reduce the extent to which we are concerned about implicit biases.15 The challenges confront the specific idea that implicit biases in individuals are epistemic vices.16 But these challenges have also motivated a new way of conceiving of implicit biases, which prompts us to consider the issue of collective epistemic vice. Next, I introduce the new model of implicit biases, and then turn to consider collective epistemic vice.

7.4 The bias of crowds Despite the fact that individuals’ scores on implicit measures are unstable, and vary from one occasion to the next, there is remarkable stability in aggregate levels of implicit biases across groups (Payne et al. 2017). This suggests that, whilst individuals’ biases are unstable, and individuals’ biases do shift, the nature of that individual shift is limited in a way that does not undermine the mean

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level of bias of a group. Moreover, whilst implicit measures are weak predictors of individual behavioral outcomes, the aggregate implicit biases of a group are more strongly associated with differential outcomes. Payne et al. draw on analyses that show that in countries in which the aggregate level of implicit gender bias is higher (in particular, the association with men and STEM subjects), there are greater gender-based achievement gaps in science and math subjects (Nosek et al. 2009); in regions with higher implicit racial biases (associating black people with negative notions such as danger or crime) there are greater racial disparities in police shootings (more black people are shot) (Hehman et al. 2018). What can explain the stable aggregate levels of implicit bias, and the stronger relationship with disparate outcomes, despite instability and weak predictions generated at the individual level? Payne et al. propose that we should see implicit biases as an attribute of situations or contexts, rather than individuals (2017, 236). By this, I take it that they want to emphasize the contribution of contextual factors to the ways individuals behave, such that patterns of biased behavior emerge across samples operating within a particular context. Indeed, their spelling out of this claim is that situations, or contexts, encode or contain social stereotypes (we might also appeal to other aspects of a social context, such as scripts, narratives, and aspects of social meaning (cf. Haslanger 2015)). Features of a particular situation affect what is situationally accessible.17 For example, if a stereotype of women as nurturing carers is prominent, that will affect the extent to which that stereotype is accessible to individuals. Likewise, if the majority of caring roles are in fact occupied by women, or if prominent representations portray women in such roles, this will also affect the extent to which a stereotype is situationally accessible. Since implicit measures record the stereotypes and associations that are accessible, individuals in that situation will display biases (on implicit measures). Indeed, the situationally accessible biases are fairly constant, so if the relevant features of the situation and all else were held completely fixed, we could expect that the individual levels of bias expressed would remain fairly constant (there would be good test-retest reliability). But we aren’t mere sponges or mirrors of our situations. The extent to which stereotypes are accessible changes for individuals across time and context, depending on who we interact with, what thoughts we have, what our latest interactions or engagements were, how present in mind stereotypes are, and other aspects of our mental lives, etc. However, across the sample as a whole, the relative constancy of the background situation, and the stereotypes in that context, contribute to a pattern of implicit bias emerging, which is (a) more stable, and (b) strongly associated with disparate outcomes. I suggest that one way to interpret these claims is that implicit bias is something manifested stably, in a way that affects behavioral outcomes, in collectives or groups. To speculatively flesh out an example: take the group of academic philosophers in Anglophone institutions. Any individual philosopher, we would expect, would demonstrate varying levels of gender bias on implicit measures. But the situationally accessible associations and stereotypes are fairly constant: in addition to the background conditions of gender inequality that prevail in wider society,18

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 135 philosophy is stereotyped as male, much of the canonical literature taught and taken as giving rise to central research questions is by male philosophers, only recently have efforts been made to include more women and scholars of color in curricula and in research events, and to uncover the contributions of marginalized philosophers to the canon. Whilst individual measures of implicit bias would vary from day to day (depending on what literature had just been read, with which colleagues one had engaged, what blogs one had read or contributed to), we would expect a fairly stable mean level of bias across a large sample of academic philosophers in Anglophone institutions. And, if in keeping with findings in other contexts, we would expect this to better predict discriminatory outcomes across the profession than individual bias predicts individual behaviors. This example is speculative, since it is modeled on Payne et al.’s Bias of Crowds way of understanding bias, rather than underpinned by systematically gathered data looking at implicit measures and behavioral outcomes in this context. But of course, it fits with what limited data we do have about gender and under-representation in philosophy19 and with the fact that plenty of anecdotal evidence points to patterns of (e.g.) gender bias. Many women in philosophy experience some form of gender bias, some of the time;20 few individuals who (presumably) have implicit gender biases express them all or even much of the time. All that is needed is that many express gender bias some of the time, even just occasionally – as in the ‘What is it like…?’ example – for deleterious and discriminatory outcomes to take effect. This is explained by the Bias of Crowds model. On this model, whereby implicit bias is a stable property of groups, and manifests stably in group behavior, should we think of it as a collective epistemic vice? On the assumption that, at least in the context under discussion, implicit gender biases obstruct inquiry (in the sorts of ways described in our ‘What is it like…?’ case) and produce the sorts of negative epistemic outcomes associated with exclusion of philosophers who otherwise have much to contribute, I focus on the question of whether it is a collective epistemic vice. Much will depend on the conception of collective vice at issue, to which I now turn.

7.5 Collective vice The contours of the case – the Bias of Crowds – I have described are as follows: the collective or group at issue is a relatively loosely formed group of individuals: members of a nation, or region, or profession – without any particular institutional structure unifying those individuals. Nonetheless, across those individuals, we find certain patterns of behavior which produce certain outcomes. These patterns of behavior are not intentionally coordinated. The outcomes are not aimed for. Is it idiosyncratic to think of such cases as instances of collective vice? Loose collectives have been considered candidates for collective virtue or vice before: Slote’s (2001) account of group agency extends to societies, broadly construed; Beggs (2003) considers his account of institutional virtue as applicable to the polis. It is not uncommon to attribute vices to loosely constituted groups: Medina writes of the epistemic arrogance of the ‘powerful and privileged’, for example

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(2013, 31). That the group is loosely constituted need not be an obstacle to seeing the Bias of Crowds as a vice.21 What matter is whether they meet other conditions for collective vice. 7.5.1 Joint commitment22 On one prominent account of collective virtue and vice, what is crucial is that there is a group or collective constituted by individuals operating under a particular practical identity (team member, or participant in some endeavor). Each individual takes on a joint commitment to some virtuous (or vicious) motive, or to some virtuous (or vicious) end that will be pursued by some good (or poor) method (Fricker, 2010, 241, 243).23 The virtuous members of the night watch each take on a commitment to vigilance, say. Joint commitment, on Fricker’s account, involves a practical and cognitive component. Cognitively, the participants each ‘take on’ a responsibility to do something, and will involve an awareness that one is committing (2010, 245).24 Practically, this means that reneging on the commitment will be accompanied by, at least, a demand for an explanation. The Bias of Crowds model obviously won’t count as collective vice on this model. It is entirely implausible to suppose that there is a joint commitment to some bad epistemic motive, or bad epistemic end, involved in cases where groups stably manifest implicit biases – that each participant of the loosely connected group has committed to make discriminatory judgments about the value of women philosophers, say, or to ignore contributions, or dismiss lines of argument. Of course, there may be pockets of bad epistemic motives, and there will most likely be bad epistemic outcomes (loss of important knowledge, failures of understanding, fruitful lines of enquiry not pursued). But it is hard to make the case that these are outcomes that members comprising a group commit to pursing, in any meaningful way of understanding that. Is this the only option, though? Perhaps we need not establish that vicious joint commitments are taken up. Indeed, at some points in Fricker’s discussion there is the suggestion that at least in the case of collective epistemic vice (if not virtue), participants need not actively take on a commitment to a bad motive or end; rather, it suffices that they fail to commit to a good motive or end.25 In this respect there is an asymmetry between vice and virtue.26 In her example of the collectively vicious night watchmen – a bunch of slackers who nod off, entertain themselves, and ‘in one or another manner signally failing to jointly commit to the end of vigilance’ (243), Fricker writes that ‘given that vigilance and negligence are exclusive opposites for a night watch, the watch thereby displays the collective vice of negligence’ (243). Merely failing to commit to some good end can, in some cases, suffice to constitute epistemic vice. On one reading of Fricker’s night watch case is that the failure to commit to a virtue itself signals a vice.27 This seems to be Fricker’s own understanding of the case, and one which applies here, since vigilance and negligence are exclusive opposites, as she puts it. But this is a limitation of her account: insofar as there are virtues in relation to which a failure to commit need not, thereby, signal vice,

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 137 these cases will not be captured by the joint commitment model. And indeed, there do seem to be such cases. A failure to jointly commit to courage need not signal cowardice; a group that does not jointly commit to generosity need not signal miserly thriftiness. In the context of biases of crowds: we might hope that a group would jointly commit to fair-mindedness; but a failure to do so does not, in itself, signify closed-minded prejudice. Such failures might simply signify that a group has other priorities: a commitment to cautious research rather than courage; a commitment to prudential budgeting rather than generosity. Or – particularly in the case of implicit bias – a failure to commit to fair-mindedness might simply signal a failure to realize that any specific commitment on the matter is needed. There will also be some vices that collectives may manifest without any joint commitment to bad ends or motives, and which are not signaled by failing to commit to the opposite virtue. A collective or group may display the vice of disorganization without having jointly committed to being disorganized. Nor does a failure to commit to good principles of organization signal a commitment to this vice. The UK government’s approach to Brexit negotiations is a good example of this. A group might display the vice of closed-mindedness without having jointly committed to this stance. Nor does a failure to commit to open-mindedness signal a commitment to this vice. The trans-exclusionary organization ‘A Woman’s Place’ is a good example of this. An institution may display the vice of petty bureaucracy without its members having jointly committed to opacity and obstructive modes of operating. Nor does a failure to commit to well-justified efficiency signal a commitment to this vice. Various helplines for utilities services exemplify this vice. And, we might contend, a group may display bias without jointly committing to biased ways of thinking. Nor need a failure to commit to fair-mindedness signal a commitment to bias. The joint commitment route to understanding collective virtue and vice, then, does not seem a promising one for capturing biases of crowds as collective epistemic vice. But there seem to be independent reasons for departing from the joint commitment model of collective vice. Some vices that collectives may display – disorganization, closed-mindedness, petty bureaucracy – are ill-captured by the joint commitment model. What other options might there be? 7.5.2 Invisible hand mechanisms and dispositions to behave A suggestive but under-explored alternative is also present in Fricker’s paper: that virtues or vices might emerge by ‘invisible hand’ mechanisms, whereby the group feature is not reflected at the individual level, but might emerge through and ‘be explained by the way in which the individual level features synthesize to create a quite different feature at group level’ (239). Fricker’s virtue-based example: a jury might be constituted by prejudiced members whose prejudices all cancel each other out, such that the overall judgment reached shows no prejudice or imbalance.28 However, Fricker doubts such invisible hand accounts are well placed to capture virtue, suggesting that the relationship between the supposed

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virtue and good conduct should not be accidental or a fluke. Rather, ‘the good conduct should be performed because of the good motive or skill’ (239). This non-accidental relationship seems not to be present in cases in which the trait in question (fair-mindedness) emerges because the prejudices happen to cancel each other out. The jury doesn’t seem creditworthy for their fair-minded verdict, she suggests; in her view ‘the same point applies to vice’ (240). But we have already seen that there could be reason for treating virtue and vice asymmetrically. This may be another instance in which the conditions for virtue and vice are not symmetrical. We could accept Fricker’s claim that, in the case of collective virtue, the feature should not emerge accidentally. But in the case of vice, we could maintain that, because negligence is one of the ways that vices can emerge, mere accident of how the individual traits synthesize can produce a collective vice.29 The general observation that groups could be vicious through negligence seems to open the door to the invisible hand mechanism being one through which genuine collective vices can arise. Suppose a jury is comprised of 12 fair-minded individuals, but they fail to consider the way that, in their group dynamics, these qualities may not be reflected; good norms of group discussion are not established, some members dominate the discussion, assuming that others will speak up if they disagree. Through negligence, the individual features of the group synthesize to produce a poorly functioning collective, that lacks the fair-mindedness that each of the constituent members individually possesses; the verdict instead is ill-informed by evidence and manifests closed-minded prejudice. It is ‘mere accident’ that this feature has emerged, in the sense that the jury did not commit to it, and its emergence is not intentional. That does not undermine the case for such a feature of the group being vicious. The group dynamic will reliably produce epistemically poor decisions. One might hold, then, that vices can emerge from invisible hand mechanisms, even if virtues cannot. We can draw on Byerly and Byerly’s (2016) account of collective virtue to develop an account of collective vice that can accommodate invisible hand vices. According to their basic account of collective virtue: Collective virtue: ‘a collective C has virtue V to the extent that C is disposed to behave in ways characteristic of V under appropriate circumstances.’ (43)30 Thus, a jury has the virtue of fair-mindedness if it is disposed to behave in ways characteristic of fair-mindedness under appropriate circumstances. If the constitution of the jury makes it such that it is so disposed, then it has the virtue of fair-mindedness – whether or not this constitution is ‘mere accident’, and whether or not the members have taken on any commitments to that end. We can readily apply this analysis to collective vice: Collective vice: a collective C has vice V to the extent that C is disposed to behave in ways characteristic of V under appropriate circumstances.

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 139 The case for collective vice thus construed may be stronger than for collective virtue, if one is swayed by the idea that the negligent production of vice should be accommodated, even if the accidental production of virtue should not.31 A jury is closed-minded or prejudiced to the extent that it is disposed to reach prejudiced verdicts. A group is disorganized to the extent that it is disposed to behave in poorly administered ways (failing to have a representative at important meetings, having incoherent policies, uninformed representatives, etc.). A collective is closed-minded to the extent that it is disposed to behave in closed-minded ways (ignoring important evidence and arguments, selecting only evidence that supports the group’s stated aims, question-begging in debates). An institution displays the vice of pettiness if it is disposed to behave in petty bureaucratic ways (opaque and obstructive procedures, unbending and inflexible adherence to protocols, insistence on procedural norms even when irrational). A collective displays the vice of bias to the extent that it is disposed to behave in discriminatory ways (patterns of behavior that disadvantage some demographic, exclusion or devaluing of the contributions of some).32 Insofar as these examples appear to be cases of vice that collectives or groups manifest, and insofar as they are manifested without joint commitment to some bad motive or end, they can nonetheless be accommodated by the dispositional account of collective vice.33 This account has some advantages over the joint commitment account: as Byerly and Byerly point out, a group may commit to virtue without, in fact, being disposed to behave in virtuous ways. Commitments count for little if they are empty. Invisible hand cases also point to the importance of dispositions to behave, rather than commitment. If vices can emerge in collectives, and these are manifested in the dispositions to behave of the collective, then again, the importance of commitment – at least for some vices – is undermined. If one thinks an account should capture invisible hand cases (of vice, if not of virtue), this will also be an advantage of the dispositional, over the joint commitment, analysis. There is independent motivation, then, for moving away from the joint commitment account as providing necessary conditions for collective vice. Some collective vices might be instantiated through joint commitments to bad ends. But others may emerge through invisible hand mechanisms and manifest in the collective’s dispositions to behave in ways characteristic of that vice. Where does this leave us in thinking about implicit bias? This way of making sense of collective vice is particularly helpful for thinking about the Bias of Crowds model. On this analysis a group has the vice of bias when it is disposed to behave in ways characteristic of bias under appropriate circumstances. For example, the collective of academic philosophers in Anglophone institutions would have the disposition to gender bias to the extent that the collective is disposed to behave in ways characteristic of gender bias (undervaluing women’s contributions, practices that exclude women from participation in research events, failures to represent women’s contributions to the discipline on curricula, and so on).34 We could also appeal to further evidence (where it is available) of such dispositions: a stable mean level of bias found across a group would be strong evidence that the

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collective has the relevant disposition. And such dispositions could be evidenced where there is a strong relationship with disparate outcomes for different demographics within that group. As noted, the collectives at issue in the Bias of Crowds model are large and loosely connected ones: nations, populations across certain regions. The extent to which we consider these samples as collectives will rest on questions in social metaphysics that cannot be settled here. But there does not seem to be any obvious reason for which we should not treat such large samples of individuals as collectives, if we find stable propensities to behave across such populations. This view of collective vice will face an objection recently advanced by Cordell (2017): that what I have identified is a feature of a collective, but does not amount to a substantive vice.35 This is for two reasons: first, he argues that if a feature is to be diagnosed as a substantive virtue or vice, then it must be something that the agent (the collective) can reflect on as something to be cultivated or eliminated from their functioning. But collectives of this sort (he argues) lack the requisite processes of reflection. Second, Cordell suggests that one could avoid this first concern by being purely instrumental about virtues or vices: whatever feature produces good or bad effects (irrespective of any mechanism for reflection on these features) is a virtue or vice of the collective. But this instrumentalist picture is not well suited to capture the extent to which the collective is an agent: the group has a feature, but it is not a feature produced by the agent. These objections may have some promise when directed towards an account of collective virtue. Perhaps for a trait to be genuinely credit-worthy it does have to be intentionally produced – perhaps via mechanisms of reflection – by the collective agent. However, I see no reason to accept these claims with respect to collective vices. As we have seen, vices of collectives could result from negligence, and so by their nature will not be the result of intentional production, or the fruits of a reflective mechanism that has decided to cultivate a particular feature. My view is that it would be an excessively restrictive view of collective vice to insist that they cannot be produced by negligence. In sum: I have argued that we have good reasons to reject the claim that collective vice requires joint commitment to some bad end or motive, and that a case can be made for vices that emerge – through negligence – via ‘invisible-hand’ mechanisms. This seems true in at least some cases for vices such as closed-mindedness, prejudice, disorganization, or pettiness – and, in particular, bias. This can be captured by an account of collective vice, drawing on Byerly and Byerly, that focuses on the disposition to behave in ways characteristic of vice. Where these dispositions or propensities affect knowledge-seeking activities, then, they can be properly described as collective epistemic vice. Implicit biases, when understood on the Bias of Crowds model, are contenders for collective epistemic vice.

7.6 Vice charging, individual and collective I have suggested that there are obstacles to determining that implicit biases are epistemic vices in the individual case. But I argued that we should think collective

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 141 vices can be captured on the ‘disposition to behave’ analysis, and can emerge without joint commitments. On that analysis, we can claim that implicit biases manifested by groups – the Biases of Crowds – are collective vices. Where patterns of implicit bias across groups serve to obstruct knowledge-seeking or produce bad epistemic effects they will be collective epistemic vices. But why should we want to be able to make such a claim? What is gained by being able to diagnose biases as vicious? What is the advantage of being able to call out collectives as vicious? As Kidd argues, charging an agent with vice should serve an ameliorative function (2016, 192); the aim should be to do so in a constructive spirit, with a view to improving the character or conduct of others.36 There are good reasons to suppose that characterizing patterns of behavior of groups and collectives as vices can serve an ameliorative function: first, doing so identifies a systematic defect in the conduct of the collective – a defect which many of the individuals comprising the collective would find reprehensible. This is particularly so in instances where the defect has emerged from invisible hand mechanisms, and where no individuals have committed to bringing about the conduct or outcomes that have emerged. Second, vice charging in the case of collectives can prompt members of the collective to reflect on how they sustain certain patterns of behavior, albeit unintentionally. It can draw the attention of individuals to ways in which they, with others, are complicit in problematic patterns of behavior and outcome, despite their individual subscription to good values, or despite good individual intentions. Third, drawing attention to individuals’ roles in perpetrating collective vices, in this way, might be a particularly good way of motivating change. Fourth, this is particularly so because it prompts members of the collective to focus not just on what they do, qua individual, but also on the structures, norms, and practices that enable these vices to be enacted at the level of the collective. Finally, it focuses attention on what collective measures are needed to avoid these problematic dispositions, and highlights the importance of collective, rather than individual, virtue in addressing these issues.37 Seeing the Bias of Crowds as a collective epistemic vice, then, may serve an important ameliorative function in addressing the problematic patterns of bias in which we are implicated.

Notes 1 This pattern may be part of a ‘perfect storm’ of factors all pointing towards exclusion (see Antony 2012). 2 Goff and Kahn (2013) show that in such studies, the paradigm ‘woman’ that participants have in mind is a white woman. As such, we should be cautious about generalizing these findings to women of color, who likely face biases that encode the ways in which gender is racialized. Similarly, they urge caution about generalizing studies about associations with black people, which may really hone in on stereotypes about black men. As such there is a lacuna in the research on implicit bias that is only recently starting to be addressed (see Theim et al. 2019 on the biases that might target black women in particular). 3 https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/ins idious-norms/ [posted 2014, accessed April 2019].

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4 It is also plausible that being influenced by bias is related to other epistemic vices: closed-mindedness, dogmatism, epistemic negligence, perhaps. I set aside the interesting task of teasing out the relationship between biases and other vices for another time. 5 But on this account, biases need not be blameworthy – merely criticizable – in order to constitute vices. 6 Interestingly, in the debate about the blameworthiness of agents for implicit biases, some who have held back from arguing that bias is blameworthy have tried to establish that nonetheless aretaic evaluations of the agent – evaluations that appeal to virtue or vice terms – are nonetheless apt (see e.g. Zheng 2016, Brownstein 2016). These authors (appealingly, I think) detach blameworthiness from the kind of virtue and vice attributions in a way that is starkly at odds with the characterization of vice on the responsibilist view. 7 But crucially, not as low as argued by the Oswald et al. (2013) meta-analysis, whose inclusion criteria Greenwald et al. critique. Note that their meta-analyses focused on implicit measures of racial attitudes. 8 Note that this is unequivocally not to say that implicit biases might have epistemic benefits (cf. Gendler 2011 for this claim, which I find problematic for the reasons elucidated in Puddifoot 2017 and Saul 2018). 9 Compare Levy’s argument for the conclusion that those who express implicit racial bias are, in some important respect, racist; even if there are other aspects of their character that are not racist, or anti-racist (2017). 10 Compare the oft-quoted remark from Jesse Jackson: ‘There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody White and feel relieved’ (Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in “Crime: New Frontier – Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue” by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times). The quote is used to illustrate that even those dedicated to anti-racism, and themselves stigmatized by the stereotypes at issue, can on occasion manifest implicit bias. As such, the behaviour of the colleagues in our example is consistent with them being card-carrying feminists (though of course, we rely on the author’s description which provides scant information about their commitments, compared to the abundant evidence of Jackson’s anti-racist activism). 11 Note that my claim is not that implicit biases could never be part of an epistemic vice that an individual possesses. In cases where implicit bias props up and is supported by explicit bias, for example, we may well find epistemic vice (and other vices). My claim is simply that implicit bias itself may not meet conditions for epistemic vice. 12 See also Brownstein et al. (2019) for discussion of whether implicit measures access traits (variously construed) or states. 13 In fact, nor do such transient states seem to qualify as modes of thinking, even. The term ‘modes of thinking’ suggests default assumptions or inference patterns that individuals tend on balance to rely on – not a mere momentary activation captured in laboratory conditions. 14 The idea that individuals’ characters are constituted by how individuals react in particular contexts – rather than as context-free fixed points – is a familiar and much discussed one (see Brownstein et al (2020) for discussion of this issue). 15 Also for reasons rehearsed in Holroyd and Saul (2019): namely that low predictive validity still gives cause for some concern that biases might, on occasion, manifest; and that the reliability is not markedly worse than other well-established measures; and that the degree of variation on implicit measures is in keeping with a general pattern of expressed biases. One’s bias might vary in strength, but less likely in valence. 16 Denying they are vices is perfectly consistent with thinking they are blameworthy in a range of ways (see Holroyd et al. 2017 for an overview of claims about responsibility, blameworthiness, and implicit bias).

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 143 17 Situational accessibility is contrasted with chronic accessibility (what is available to the agent given their psychological make-up), but as the authors note, these two kinds of accessibility will interact (Payne et al 2017, 236). 18 As Saul 2013 notes, these wider societal background conditions cannot be the whole of the story, because philosophy is much worse, in terms of gender inclusion, than other subjects in the humanities and most others across academia. 19 See Holroyd and Saul 2019 for an overview of some of the relevant data on inclusion in philosophy. This draws on data from Beebee and Saul 2011, Norlock 2011, Botts et al. 2014 inter alia. 20 Though as reports on the ‘What is it like…?’ blog indicate, some of these experiences look to be the result of blatant and explicit sexism. 21 Note, though, that the sort of groups I have in mind above are unlikely to meet Beggs’ (2003) conditions for constituting a collective (solidarity and decision procedures). 22 An assumption in what follows is that the discussion is premised on an anti-summativist conception of vice – that is, a conception whereby the collective vice is not reducible to vices of the individual. This is precisely what is at stake in discussions of group-level implicit biases – the property of the group (stable biases that correlate with disparate outcomes) is precisely what is harder to establish at the individual level. I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing defensible about summativist conceptions, but simply that such accounts will not be the right model for the case in hand. For discussion of summativist and anti-summativist approaches, see Fricker 2010, Lahroodi 2007, Cordell 2017, Byerly & Byerly 2016. 23 Fricker also notes some reliability condition will also be needed, to ensure the relationship between the motive or method and good outcome. 24 Though as Fricker emphasizes, it need not involve awareness that one is committing to something qua virtue, nor the reliable relationship between that motive or way of proceeding and good outcomes. 25 Compare Battaly’s concept 2* that requires not that individuals commit to a bad motive, but that they fail to commit to a good motive. On a strong reading, Battaly argues, this is an implausible view (2014, 64). 26 I have learnt much about these putative asymmetries from discussions with Charlie Crerar. See also Crerar (2018). 27 An alternative reading would have it that there is tacit joint commitment between the watch members. They are aware that they are each taking on a certain – bad, negligent – way of proceeding, and expect each other to follow suit. This rendering of Fricker’s watch case is consistent with her analysis of virtue and vice in terms of joint commitment, but will not capture the Bias of Crowds. Consider the speculative example from the last section: it stretches credulity to suppose that academic philosophers have tacitly committed to ignoring certain contributions, or dismissing and undervaluing lines of argument coming from women. 28 Another example Fricker uses is that of a debating society, the members of which are prejudiced but whose prejudices cancel each other out such that the debate overall shows no prejudice. One might find this example stretches credulity, since a non-prejudiced debate concerns not just the balance of views expressed, but also the contents of what is expressed. For this reason I focus on the jury example (since jury deliberations are not revealed, any prejudiced contents expressed will not be known). 29 Compare Battaly’s remark (2014, 64) that in individuals vices can negligently emerge. 30 They offer a more complex formulation of this basic account (at p. 43), which makes clear that the virtue can be construed in terms of group-dependent properties that individual members have. However, because I find their argument from multiple realizability convincing (an argument which purports to show that groups can have properties that are not reducible to the individual realizers of those properties), I stick with this more basic formulation. Nothing in the argument turns on this though, so readers are free to substitute the more complex formulation from Byerly and Byerly should they see fit.

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31 I want to remain agnostic on what we should say about invisible hand mechanisms producing virtue. My main point is that whatever we say about virtue, a case can be made that collective vices can emerge through these invisible-hand mechanisms, negligence being one of the key ways in which they can do so. 32 Note that whilst the emergence of the group-level property is not intentional, in the case of bias it is not ‘mere accident’; social structures of racism and sexism are effective engineers of these group-level properties. 33 We might ultimately come to quite different views regarding the vices of institutions and groups or collectives on a number of matters, such as their collective responsibility and blameworthiness, as well as forward-looking responsibilities for correcting vice. These issues, which would have to address the hierarchical structures and power dynamics involved in each, are beyond the scope of this chapter. 34 Beggs suggests that ‘practice’ might be considered the group analogue to individual disposition (2003, 51). Practice on his account is understood as ‘the social grammars (the types) that an individual agent’s actions manifest (the tokens)’ (466). 35 He advances another line of objection, targeted at Fricker’s joint commitment account: that she has not provided an account of an irreducibly collective virtue – rather, he argues, the virtues can be reduced to the commitments of individuals in their grouporiented roles. Since I think there are other reasons to depart from Fricker’s joint commitment account, I set aside this concern here. It is clear that the feature of the group with which I am concerned – bias – is irreducible to members of the collective, given the considerations raised in Section 7.3. 36 Kidd also notes that vice charges should ‘build in a suitably complex account of agential epistemic responsibility’ (2016, 194) and in particular one that is sensitive to the aetiology of the vice. As noted in endnote 6, I find attractive a view according to which vice attribution does not depend on establishing blameworthiness. Of course, there will be many interesting and complex questions to address regarding collective responsibility or blame for implicit bias. In particular, it will be important in this context to be sensitive to the power dynamics within the group, especially when it comes to forwardlooking responsibility: whose responsibility it is to undertake, or lead the way in taking, corrective steps. 37 See Anderson (2012) for concerns that a focus on individual virtue is an insufficient corrective for addressing implicit biases.

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Holroyd, J., Scaife, R., and Stafford, T. (2017). “Responsibility for implicit bias.” Philosophy Compass, 12(3), e12410. Holroyd, J., and Saul, J. (2019). “Implicit bias research and reform efforts in philosophy: A defence.” Philosophical Topics, 48(2). Insidious Norms, post at “What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?’ https://be ingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/insidious-norms/ [posted 2014, accessed April 2019]. Kidd, I. J. (2016). “Charging others with epistemic vice.” The Monist, 99(2), 181–197. Lahroodi, R. (2007). “Collective epistemic virtues.” Social Epistemology, 21(3), 281–297. Levy, N. (2017). “Am I a racist? Implicit bias and the ascription of racism.” The Philosophical Quarterly, 67(268), 534–551. Madva, A. (2016). “A plea for anti-anti-individualism: How oversimple psychology misleads social policy.” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 3. Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Moss-Racusin, C., Dovidio, J., Brescoll, V., Graham, M., and Handelsman, J. (2012). “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students.” PNAS, 109(41), 16474–16479. Norlock, K. (2011). “Women in the profession: A report to the CSW.” American Philosophical Association (February). Nosek, B. A., Smyth, F. L., Sriram, N., Lindner, N. M., Devos, T., Ayala, A., and Kesebir, S. (2009). “National differences in gender–science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26), 10593–10597. Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., and Tetlock, P. E. (2013). “Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 171–192. Payne, B. K. (2006). “Weapon Bias: Split-Second Decisions and Unintended Stereotyping.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(6), 287–291. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1467-8721.2006.00454.x Payne, B. Keith, Vuletich, Heidi A., and Lundberg, Kristjen B. (2017). “The bias of crowds: How implicit bias bridges personal and systemic prejudice.” Psychological Inquiry, 28(4), 233–248. Puddifoot, K. (2017). “Stereotyping: The multifactorial view.” Philosophical Topics, 45(1), 137–156. Rudman, L. A., and Kilianski, S. E. (2000). “Implicit and explicit attitudes toward female authority.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(11), 1315–1328. Saul, J. (2013). “Implicit bias, stereotype threat, and women in philosophy.” In: K. Hutchinson and F. Jenkins (eds.), Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39–60. Saul, J. (2018). “(How) should we tell implicit bias stories?” Disputatio, 10(50), 217–244. Sue, Derald Wing, Capodilupo, Christina M., and Holder, Aisha. (2008). “Racial microaggressions in the life experience of Black Americans.” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 39(3), 329. Slote, M. (2001). Morals from Motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thiem, K. C., Neel, R., Simpson, A. J., & Todd, A. R. (2019). “Are black women and girls associated with danger? Implicit racial bias at the intersection of target age and gender.” Personality and social psychology bulletin, 45(10), 1427–1439.

Implicit bias and epistemic vice 147 Valian, V. (2005). “Beyond gender schemas: Improving the advancement of women in academia.” Hypatia, 20(3), 198–213. Williams, Joan C. (2014). “Double jeopardy? An empirical study with implications for the debates over implicit bias and intersectionality.” Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, 37, 185. Zheng, R. (2016). “Attributability, accountability and implicit attitudes.” In: M. Brownstein and J. Saul (Eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62–89.

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Vectors of epistemic insecurity Emily Sullivan and Mark Alfano

8.1 Introduction Virtue epistemologists have largely neglected the ways in which epistemic virtue functions in social epistemic environments of inter-connected information sharers. Testimonial exchanges between two people receive the bulk of the attention.1 Moreover, only recently have epistemologists recognized that epistemic virtues, like moral virtues, can be other-regarding (Kawall 2002; Fricker 2007). The slow arrival of the social within virtue epistemology is likely due to the fact that virtue is mainly understood as localized within an individual (Battaly 2008; Greco 2010; Montmarquet 1992; Sosa 2007; Zagzebski 1996).2 In this paper, we highlight the ways in which epistemic virtue and vice depend on the larger structure of one’s epistemic community (Alfano and Skorburg 2017a, 2017b). In particular, we address the way that modal epistemic standings and the virtues and vices that accompany these standings are networked. We first consider the familiar modal epistemic standing of safety, which obtains when the epistemic agent could not easily have believed falsely (Pritchard 2007). We argue that safety in a social network context is best understood as vector-relativized. One’s belief is safe only if, holding constant the structure of one’s network of informants (and one’s informants, and one’s informants’ informants … ), there is no close possible world in which one’s belief turns out false. We then introduce a complementary modal epistemic standings, belief-security and network-security, to cover a related phenomenon. One’s belief is secure only if, given small perturbations in the structure of one’s network of informants (and one’s informants, and one’s informants’ informants … ), there is no close possible world in which one’s belief turns out false. One’s network is secure only if, given one’s network of informants, and given small perturbations in the structure of one’s network of informants, one does not depend only on a small number of non-independent sources for information. Given this framework, we discuss the virtues and vices that are operative within the social epistemic context and how these dispositions navigate the trade-offs between security and safety narrowly construed. Understanding epistemic virtue and vice as depending on the larger structure of one’s epistemic community enables us to capture the unique qualities of social epistemic communities and the modal epistemic standings operative within them.

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8.2 Toward vector-relativized modal epistemic standings Nozick (1981) argued that a modal requirement on knowledge is necessary. Beliefs are epistemically better to the extent that they are sensitive. A belief is sensitive iff S knows p via a method M only if, were p false, S would not believe p via M. Nozick’s notion of sensitivity has since been abandoned for an alternative modal standing: safety. Safety seeks to capture Nozick’s intuition that knowledge has a modal requirement without the purported drawbacks of skepticism, abandoning closure, and failing to allow for the possibility of knowledge about necessary truths (Pritchard 2009; Sosa 1999a, 1999b; Williamson 2002). Safety continues to play a central role in anti-luck epistemology. Recently, Pritchard (2016) proposed that a related concept, epistemic risk, is more fundamental than safety. We aren’t interested here in providing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. Instead, we are interested in a range of modal standings that—regardless of whether they are constitutive of knowledge—are epistemically (dis)valuable in social epistemic networks. The central discussions surrounding these modal epistemic concepts focus almost exclusively on cases of testimonial knowledge between two people or the knowledge one person gains from her immediate environment. Moreover, discussions of testimony almost exclusively ignore the complexities that emerge when individuals are embedded within a structured community, and how this complexity might impact modal epistemic standings. In this section we argue that understanding safety as vector-relativized brings modal epistemic standings in line with a truly social epistemology. Generally speaking, a belief is safe when it could not have easily been false. While there are many different formulations of safety (Pritchard 2009; Sosa 1999a, 1999b; Williamson 2002), the basic idea is that knowledge is not compatible with a certain type of luck. In cases where luck is one of the main reasons why a person’s belief is true, it seems that the person does not know. Much ink has been spilled explicating the conditions under which a belief is safe (Kelp 2009; Rabinowitz 2011). A central part of the nuance comes in explicating what it means for a possible world to be close and what degree of closeness undermines knowledge. Leaving the discussion of close possible worlds aside, we turn to a related issue that many agree on: safety is basis-relative. In judging whether one’s belief is safe, we need to hold fixed the basis on which, or method by which, the belief was formed (Nozick 1981: 179). For example, if Alberto formed a true belief based on Jane’s testimony, then we should consider the close possible worlds where that belief, based on Jane’s testimony, is false. Even if it is (closely) possible that Alberto could believe the same proposition by reading it in the newspaper, or by consulting a Magic 8-Ball, these facts do not impinge on the question whether Alberto’s belief—based on Jane’s testimony—is safe. This results in the following definition of safety: Basis-relative safety: S believes that p safely on basis B iff there is no close possible world in which S falsely believes p on B.

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Cases of testimonial belief raise interesting questions concerning whether the testifier’s belief must be safe in order for the receiver’s belief to be safe. Goldberg (2005, 2007) argues that one can in fact have a safe belief from unsafe testimony. He asks us to consider the following case: Milk Carton: Mary observes a small carton of milk in Frank’s fridge at 7:40am. She tells Sonny (who always has cereal with milk for breakfast) that there is milk in the fridge. Sonny forms the true belief based on Mary’s testimony that there is milk in the fridge. However, unbeknownst to both of them, this is just a matter of luck. On every other morning, except this one, Frank at 7:30 empties the milk carton and places the empty carton back in the fridge. However, since Frank is in the kitchen with both Mary and Sonny, in all possible worlds where the carton was empty, Frank would have interjected and corrected Mary’s testimony. Thus, there is no possible world in which Sonny’s belief is false. (Goldberg 2005: 302) The idea is that even though Mary’s testimony is unsafe, Sonny still forms a safe belief based on her testimony because there is no close possible world in which his belief is false. Debate has since followed about whether Goldberg’s intuition about unsafe testimony is right, and whether Sonny’s belief is actually a belief based on testimony (Lackey 2008; Pelling 2013). We are not here interested in joining that debate. Instead, we want to highlight that this case serves to broaden the scope of how we should think of modal epistemic standings such as safety. In particular, milk carton shows that safety is vector-relative.3 It is our contention that Sonny seems to have a safe belief because he is not in an epistemic dyad, where information is shared from exactly one person to exactly one other person. Instead, Sonny is in an epistemic network with two sources, one actual (Mary) and the other merely potential (Frank). The presence of both these sources entails that the belief Sonny has about the milk in the fridge will be true in all close possible worlds. Thus, once we move beyond epistemic dyads to a truly social epistemology it is evident that the structure of one’s epistemic network greatly impacts whether one has knowledge. We therefore propose the following account of safety in a social epistemic network: Vector-relative safety: S believes that p safely within epistemic network N iff there is no close possible world in which S falsely believes that p in N. Vector-relative safety can also explain why someone’s belief is unsafe. Consider another case introduced by Pritchard (2010: 77–79). House Fire: Imagine that Campbell comes home to find his house on fire. The fire department is already on the scene. Campbell sees a number of people dressed in fire protective gear. He approaches one of these people and inquires about the cause of the house fire. He receives testimony from the fire official that

Vectors of epistemic insecurity 151 the fire was caused by faulty wiring. Campbell then forms the true belief that the fire was caused by faulty wiring. However, unbeknownst to Campbell, the other people he saw dressed in fire gear were not fire fighters but people on their way to a firefighter themed costume party. Campbell’s belief that the fire was caused by faulty writing could easily have been false, because in close possible worlds Campbell did not ask a real fire official but an unreliable party goer. House fire is a classic of case of environmental luck. Campbell finds himself in a bad epistemic environment, and as such does not have a safe belief. Notice that this case is also vector-relative. Campbell’s belief is unsafe because he finds himself in an epistemic network of mostly party-goers disposed to give false or unreliable testimony. In the classic fake barn county case (Goldman, 1976), the bad epistemic environment is not specifically a bad social epistemic environment, so the vectorrelative aspect of safety does not arise. However, in testimonial cases it is useful to think of modal epistemic standings as vector-relative to better capture and diagnose epistemic success and failure. In this regard, we are not suggesting a replacement for basis-relative safety. We are suggesting that in social epistemic cases the basis of one’s belief is essentially dependent on the structure of one’s epistemic network. Furthermore, as we argue in Section 8.4, understanding safety as vector-relative uncovers steps agents can take to place themselves in a better epistemic position and cultivate the virtues needed (and avoid related vices) in a truly interconnected social epistemic network.

8.3 Epistemic security Vector-relativized safety is a modal standing that captures someone’s epistemic position given the current structure of her epistemic network. We hold the network structure fixed when considering counterfactual possibilities of false belief. We argued above that thinking of safety in this way better captures epistemic success and failure in a truly social testimonial network. Once we accept the usefulness of a modal epistemic standing that keeps the network structure fixed, it’s natural to think about another modal epistemic standing that considers close possible worlds of (slightly) different network structures. Call this epistemic security. Unlike safety, which tracks whether one is currently in a good social epistemic environment, epistemic security tracks how robust this environment is to changes. This is especially important in cases in which there are members of the social epistemic community intentionally working to deceive, mislead, and manipulate. There are two notions of epistemic security: the security of one’s network, and the security of one’s belief. Belief-security: S believes that p securely within epistemic network N iff there is no close possible world in which S falsely believes that p in N′, where N′ is a network

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Emily Sullivan and Mark Alfano that can be generated by adding or deleting a small number of testimonial links in N. Network-security: S is in a secure epistemic network N iff S’s epistemic well-being in N does not depend on a small number of independent sources and there is no close possible world in which S’s epistemic well-being depends on a small number of sources in N′, where N′ is a network that can be generated by adding or deleting a small number of testimonial links in N.

First consider belief-security. While all epistemically secure beliefs are safe, not all safe beliefs are secure. Mixed cases involving safety but not security occur when just a few small changes to the geometry of the testimonial network would result in the agent no longer believing the true proposition in question. For example, consider a case in which S receives testimony about p from three other agents: A, B, and C. In the actual world, A and B truly testify that p, whereas C falsely testifies that ~p. Now consider a counterfactual scenario in which C testifies to both A and B that ~p before they have a chance to speak to S. In light of C’s testimony, both A and B abandon their belief in p and so are not inclined to testify that p to S. In this nearby possible world, the only testimony that S receives indicates that ~p. Thus, while her belief is safe (i.e., true in close possible worlds holding fixed the network structure), it is not secure. On the other hand, network-security considers network structure only. We abstract away from the exact testimony and beliefs of the agents in question. This means that occupying a more secure network may increase the likelihood of true beliefs in the future, but it may not. If agents happen to be clued in to reliable and trustworthy sources—even if the network is insecure—they will still fare well. However, if an agent is in a network with several independent sources, but none of them are trustworthy, then she will not fare well, despite the network-security. Just as safety is a modal epistemic standing that captures how luck is incompatible with knowledge, epistemic security captures the way that the structure of one’s network, and the beliefs one forms in that network, should be immune to luck and resilient to bad actors. It shouldn’t just be a matter of happenstance that someone gains true beliefs given the network structure that she occupies. The epistemic value of belief-security should be intuitive. Belief-security concerns the likelihood of someone maintaining a true belief in the face of network changes. However, the value of an epistemically secure network may strike some as unintuitive. Thus, in this paper we mostly develop a case for network-security. An epistemically secure network is one where the epistemic well-being of an agent isn’t dependent on the epistemic good-will of one or just a few other agents. It is our contention that epistemic network-security is worth aiming for not only if it increases the likelihood of true beliefs, but also because secure networks promote epistemic growth and epistemic autonomy. To see why, consider a non-epistemic case. Kant (1797) in the Metaphysics of Morals (MM) argues

Vectors of epistemic insecurity 153 that political rights are necessary for a person’s freedom and autonomy to be respected. Without these rights, the well-being of someone is dependent on the good-will of others. Korsgaard (2012: 2) puts the point nicely: [Kant] argued that without the institution of enforce-able legal rights, our relationships with each other must be characterized by the unilateral domination of some individuals over others. The problem is not, or not merely, that the strong are likely to tyrannize over the weak. Even if the strong were scrupulous about not interfering with the actions or the possessions of the weak, still, without rights, the weak would be able to act on their own judgment and retain their own possessions only on the sufferance of the strong (MM 6:312). Since her innate right to freedom is violated when one person is dependent on some other person’s good-will, Kant thinks it is a duty, and not just a convenience, for human beings to live in a political state in which every person’s rights are enforced and upheld (MM 6:307–8). In the case where the leader of the society has good-will, rights will not make a practical difference to those in the society. However, their well-being is still less secure. In the close possible worlds where the leader is replaced, or the strong have a change of heart (for the worse), then the weak have no protections. So even if political security does not make a practical difference in day-to-day lives, it is still valuable. It is a matter of luck, or happenstance, that each person’s well-being is respected. We find analogous results in the epistemic case. If someone is in an insecure testimonial network but the source he relies on is reliable and accurate, the lack of security is epistemically problematic. The agent lacks a clear sense of epistemic autonomy, with little opportunity to grow epistemically. Moreover, in close possible worlds where the source is not reliable or has a change of heart, the hearer of testimony loses whatever good epistemic position he had. Figure 8.1a shows such an insecure testimonial network (from the perspective of any of the outer nodes). In this star-network the center node (the source node) is the only source the outer nodes (receivers of testimony) are drawing on. Each outer node is dependent on the center to supply accurate and truthful information (Alfano 2016; Freeman 1978). Indeed, star-networks are associated with a number of problematic and harmful practices. Sexual predators and their targets often form a star-network, with the predator at the center and the victims on the points of the star. This keeps the victims from effectively communicating with one another, and coordinating or cooperating against the predator (Fire, Katz, Elovici 2012). Star-networks are also associated with financial fraud (Šubelj, Furlan, Bajec 2011), academic fraud (Callaway 2011), and terrorist activities (Reid et al. 2005; Krebs 2002). Making small adjustments to the network where the outer nodes themselves become directly connected (Figure 8.1b), makes the center node’s network more secure. The outer nodes can confer with each other on the merits of the center node’s testimony. Epistemic well-being is no longer dependent solely on one other person.

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(b)

Figure 8.1 (a) Star-network. (b) More secure network

In more connected networks, the structures become more complicated, and it may take some effort for an agent to be aware of the level of network-security she has. Figure 8.2 shows an example of an insecure network that at first may seem secure (Alfano et al. 2018). Imagine that Sana (represented by the white node) finds herself in an epistemic network consisting of four different people to whom she is directly connected. When she seeks information about some topic, she enters a conversation with each person separately. She finds that every time the same three people (represented by black nodes) always give the same answer. Sometimes their answer is the same as that provided by the fourth person (represented by the grey node), sometimes it isn’t. According to Sana’s immediate perspective, it seems as though she is in a secure network with four independent sources that help her to converge on the truth. However, when we zoom out we see that the three people who always agree are actually just passing on the information from one single source. So in reality Sana is drawing from only two sources, not four. Her position is less secure than she thought. Three of the people she talks with are not genuine sources of information, but mere conduits. They are simply passing along information. Only when Sana monitors the structure of her network with the goal of increasing her network-security does it become transparent that she should seek out more independent sources to guard against misleading and false information (or just overly amplified information).4 Cases like the one modeled by Figure 8.2 seem to be increasingly common in today’s social media environment. Large platforms such as Facebook and Twitter specialize in amplifying viral content, which makes it seem more prevalent (and thus more likely to be true) than it really is. Moreover, organized groups of trolls (e.g., on 4chan and 8chan), advertising firms, and political consultancies make efforts to hijack the amplification process and spread their preferred messages. To do so, they manipulate the structure of online testimonial networks. This process is essentially one of undermining network-security for the sake of some other

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Figure 8.2 Insecure network

motive (the lulz, profit, or desired political outcomes, respectively). Only when we have a clear grasp of what network-security is and why it is valuable does this phenomenon make sense. Taking a network perspective on how we access information from a community of information sharers, we see that there are more than two possible epistemic roles in testimonial exchanges. There are receivers (those who listen to information), sources (those who are the primary sources of information), and conduits (those who pass on information from sources) (Sullivan et al. 2020).5 The line between a conduit and a source is not always clear cut. Someone who passes along information he heard from another source can be more or less reflective before passing the information along. Someone who brings their own background knowledge to bear on the information, and engages in an independent check before sharing, more closely resembles a source than a conduit. For the sake of this paper, we treat conduits as simply passing along information in a minimally reflective way, such that the conduit could reasonably “pass the buck” to the original source.6 We expect that someone who brings their own relevant background knowledge to bear on an issue, or who carries out an independent check, could not reasonably pass the buck. Importantly, tracking network-security requires monitoring the structure of one’s network as well as the epistemic roles (receiver, conduit, source) that individuals in the network play. This allows agents to restructure their networks, making them more resilient. It also enables them to maintain intellectual autonomy, and not to depend overmuch on the epistemic good-will of others. That said, it’s worth addressing an important disanalogy between Kant’s political case and the epistemic case. There is no authority upholding “epistemic rights” in the epistemic case.7 So in the end we are all dependent on the larger epistemic community. This is made salient in Pritchard’s house fire case. Campbell is in a relatively secure network given the number of sources at his disposal, but it is still the case that many of these sources, if they are disposed to mislead, could prohibit Campbell from gaining knowledge. So while the structure of the network qua structure is secure, there is still a lack of safety and belief-security. This highlights the

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point that network-security is just one of several features that need attending to in social epistemic networks. It also suggests that there are trade-offs between security and safety. Thus, part of acting virtuously in a social network is navigating these trade-offs in a way that does not lead to vicious epistemic behavior. In the next section we consider the virtues and vices involved in negotiating the trade-offs within insecure epistemic environments and the trade-offs between security and safety.

8.4 Virtue and vice in social epistemic networks Several epistemic virtues and vices are relevant in social epistemic environments. Many of these virtues are already widely discussed, such as open-mindedness (Riggs 2010). However, if what we have been saying about social epistemic communities is on the right track, maintaining knowledge in a social epistemic environment requires distinct considerations.8 We want to draw attention to three classes of virtues that only arise in social epistemic networks: monitoring, adjusting, and restructuring. To our knowledge, these dispositions have been almost entirely neglected by virtue epistemologists, who tend to favor a very individualistic approach. As we will see below, all three types of dispositions have similar structures to more traditional epistemic virtues. They involve sub-dispositions related to attention, motivation, cognition, and so on. In addition, as we shall argue, they are scaffolded on one another. One can only embody an effective adjusting or restructuring virtue if one is sufficiently adept at monitoring. In short, monitoring makes one alert to imperfections in the structure of one’s epistemic network, and those imperfections can be addressed either by leaving the structure intact while modulating one’s trust or credence in various sources, or by altering the structure itself. In addition, given that these virtues are operative in a social epistemic environment, they may be both self-regarding and other-regarding. Moreover, vices, such as dogmatism, in the social epistemic context are manifested through vicious monitoring, adjusting, and restructuring. 8.4.1 Monitoring In order to benefit from the knowledge embodied in one’s social network, one should monitor and understand the structure of that network. This applies to both safe and secure belief. In milk carton, Sonny’s belief is safe because of the structure of his network. Sonny would do well to monitor this structure so he can be attuned to any actions he could take to improve his epistemic position, and whether he should believe the testimony of Mary or seek further testimony. It is only through monitoring this structure that these considerations come to the fore. While monitoring the structure of the network is important, one must also monitor the epistemic roles and track-records of those in the network. Do my sources have a reliable track-record, or do they often provide false or misleading information? Are my sources independent, or are they conduits simply amplifying the messages of others? In the former case, I may be able to benefit from the wisdom of crowds, as the Condorcet Jury Theorem and related proofs indicate (List

Vectors of epistemic insecurity 157 2001; Masterton et al. 2016; Sullivan et al. 2020). In the latter, I may not. Even though monitoring the epistemic roles and track-records of others goes beyond the structure of the network, it is only through contextualizing these sources within a network structure that I am able to shape current and future epistemic behavior. That said, the way modal standings like safety help shape future behavior is not always obvious. Gardiner (2017), for example, criticizes current conceptions of safety because they do not allow agents to actively select for safe belief. According to Gardiner, since safety is an external condition on knowledge and only concerned with counterfactual properties of a specific belief, it does not affect future beliefs. Furthermore, since safety concerns only nearby possible worlds, selecting for safe belief in the actual world is not possible. Instead, Gardiner argues, safety simply tracks whether someone currently is in good epistemic environment, without guiding future behavior. However, by understanding safety (and security) as vector-relative these worries fall away. Monitoring, when done virtuously, is explicitly attuned to locating epistemic opportunities and threats in one’s network. Monitoring requires seeing the structure of one’s network as signaling possible network improvements and signaling how to weigh differing testimony both in the actual world and nearby counterfactuals. Considering epistemic sources apart from the network context, and considering whether one’s belief is safe apart from network context, leaves one vulnerable to epistemically vicious dispositions and habits of behavior, such as dogmatism and closed-mindedness. For example, without monitoring the structure of my network, I may be in an epistemic echo-chamber that, while appearing epistemically diverse, actually cuts me off from potential knowledge today and tomorrow. Thus, monitoring virtues concern the way that agents actively keep track of their epistemic position in various domains and contexts, and why keeping track of this position is epistemically beneficial. Monitoring virtues can also be other-regarding. I can benefit others by recommending sources to them, or telling them to stop listening to certain sources to increase their safety and security. But I can only do this if I monitor the structure of their social networks, the track-record of these sources, and the epistemic roles of those in their network. Moreover, monitoring can be done with epistemically malevolent or benevolent motivations; one can monitor with the aim of finding ways to improve another person’s epistemic position or to undermine it. Consider a case of malevolent monitoring. One of Baehr’s (2010) examples of personal epistemic malevolence seems especially relevant. Baehr asks us to consider how Frederick Douglass was treated with epistemic malevolence by his owners. The patriarch of the house, Tom, upon discovering his wife Sofia teaching Douglass how to read, actively worked to sever their ties. Tom was monitoring the structure of Douglass’s epistemic network with epistemically malevolent motivations. He wanted to undermine Douglass’s epistemic well-being. This was only possible through vicious monitoring. Vicious monitoring can also be epistemically negligent, instead of malevolent. Online social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, currently embody this type of vicious monitoring. Both platforms actively monitor the epistemic network of each user. However, their monitoring is not done to increase the

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epistemic well-being of the users; instead monitoring is guided solely by the profit motive. Concern for epistemic values is absent. Moreover, the monitoring of these platforms is arguably done in a vicious way, as seen by the privacy violations associated with the Cambridge Analytical scandal (Timberg et al. 2018). Monitoring in a virtuous way with virtuous aims takes effort. It involves weighing different values, not just maximizing true and minimizing false beliefs. The values of privacy and epistemic autonomy, in addition to truth, are especially salient in this context. 8.4.2 Adjusting One reason for monitoring one’s network is to be able to know how to calibrate and adjust the weight one should give to sources and pieces of information spread throughout the network. Every real social epistemic network is imperfect, at least to some extent. If I manage to monitor the structure of my own network sufficiently well, I may be able to adjust my credences to account for its imperfections. The monitoring virtue is thus conceptually prior to the adjusting virtue. And the two are distinct. In principle, I could monitor the structure of my testimonial network adequately without being disposed to take into account the imperfections I identify when updating my beliefs. Likewise, I could monitor the epistemic trackrecords of my sources adequately without being disposed to distrust those who have proven themselves unreliable. Thus, adjusting virtues govern how someone should utilize the knowledge she gained from monitoring her network’s structure, sources’ track-records, and the epistemic roles of the agents in her network. For example, if someone is in a network structured in a way similar to Figure 8.2, she should not ascribe more weight to the information coming from the conduits just because the information is repeated by more people. Instead, she should consider the reliability of their source node (the black node on the far left). Information distributed in a secure network should be weighted differently, as compared to information distributed in an insecure network. Thus, as with monitoring virtues, it is the structure of the network that gives shape to adjusting virtues. It is not possible to virtuously weigh the testimony of someone within a social network without considering the structure of the network. Failure to do so will preclude knowing whether someone is a conduit or a source, which in turn leads to failure in correctly assessing whether one’s belief is safe or secure. Adjusting virtues can also be other-regarding. I may be able to benefit others by suggesting that they put more or less trust in various sources located in their social epistemic network. Contrariwise, I may be able to harm them epistemically by making opposite suggestions. The ability to do so depends on other-regarding monitoring dispositions, but exercising that ability (ir)responsibly is its own epistemic virtue or vice. Failing to adjust one’s beliefs (and not suggesting adjustments to others) based on the structure of the network not only risks developing adjusting vices, but risks developing more deep-seated vices like dogmatism and close-mindedness. In a social epistemic environment, networked vices are intimately connected to and give rise to other vices.

Vectors of epistemic insecurity 159 8.4.3 Restructuring While all real social epistemic networks are imperfect, sometimes they are so flawed that they need to be modified. Networks can (to some extent) be rewired. This could involve seeking out new sources, no longer listening to sources one had previously trusted, or effecting more distal changes in the structure of the network. Doing this well depends on sufficiently successful monitoring, recognition that attempts to adjust credences are not up to the task, and the motivation and capacity to identify efficient and effective changes that one has the power to enact. The latter dispositions are components of restructuring as self-regarding social epistemic virtues. And as with the other dispositions in this taxonomy, one could embody correlative vices instead of virtues. One could, for instance, be disposed to cut oneself off from reliable testifiers, plug oneself into networks that amplify fake news and conspiracy theories, and so on. How exactly do and should we navigate the process of restructuring our own and others’ testimonial networks? Levy (2017) argues that you should cut yourself off completely from sources of fake, misleading, and unreliable news. He cites a wealth of psychological studies that suggest that humans are easily persuaded by false information, even if they know full well that the information is false. Humans have cognitive biases such that we tend to misremember sources of information and believe fictions (e.g., Marsh et al. 2016; Prentice et al. 1997; Wheeler et al. 1999). Levy argues that even being exposed to false information leaves us vulnerable to acquiring false beliefs. Through the lens of our framework, Levy values safety and belief-security over network-security: we should limit the number of sources to only those that reliably provide good information. While this might seem like a restructuring virtue, we want to suggest that, for several reasons, such behavior can actually manifest as a restructuring vice. First, by cutting myself off from an untrustworthy source, I end up more dependent on the remaining sources I do trust. Thus, by making myself less vulnerable against that untrustworthy source, my network becomes less secure, and I become more vulnerable to my remaining sources. This can become a problem. Sources can change slowly over time with respect to how reliable, independent, and epistemically well-intentioned they are. As a real-world example, small local media companies in the United States are undergoing a takeover by a single company, Sinclair Media, that has a clear ideological agenda (Stelter 2018). Safeguarding networksecurity by keeping many different types of sources in one’s network can better guard against this type of epistemic takeover. Furthermore, it provides agents with the opportunity for epistemic growth, despite the vulnerability to false information. Engaging even with propaganda can serve to develop better epistemic skills, if the propaganda serves as a negative epistemic exemplar. It is possible to learn what to avoid and how to spot similar but different bad epistemic behavior in future instances from bad epistemic examples (Alfano 2013; Sullivan and Alfano 2019). Second, limiting any engagement with unreliable sources lessens my potential to develop other-regarding restructuring virtues. Other-regarding restructuring virtues involve being disposed to help others rewire their trust (and distrust)

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networks so that they are epistemically better off and less vulnerable. However, if I am overly concerned with limiting my own exposure to false and unreliable information, then I will be unable to advise others how to better their networks. In order to help others, I need to monitor their networks. Part of this monitoring will include exposing myself to false and misleading information. This is not to say there is never a source that you should sever ties with. Instead, we contend that the solution to false and intentionally misleading news is not a divide and conquer strategy. One should take a more encompassing view of what it means to do well epistemically. A single-minded concern for the truth of one’s own beliefs, neglecting network-security, can cut one off from other epistemic desiderata, and from developing important other-regarding epistemic virtues. What Levy and others who advocate cutting oneself off from fake news and related phenomena neglect is that there is a sort of collective action problem here: single-mindedly focusing on the verisimilitude of my own beliefs may lead me to neglect the epistemic well-being of my community. Lastly, it is imperative to discuss other-regarding restructuring vices. Getting other people to stop trusting reliable sources and to plug themselves into amplifiers of fake news and conspiracy theories is a restructuring epistemic vice. As discussed alongside Figure 8.1a, this practice is often employed by sexual harassers and abusers, and perpetrators of financial and academic fraud. Such actors seek to make others epistemically dependent on them. This can be done with malevolent intentions, or it may not. Cases with malevolent intentions (including those already mentioned) are easy to see. In the case of Fredrick Douglass, Tom actively restructured Douglass’s epistemic network for the worse. Tom limited the potential for Douglass’s epistemic growth and intellectual autonomy by severing ties between Douglass and his epistemic informants. Even someone who has well-intentioned motivations and has access to the truth, but reduces others’ network-security, making others epistemically dependent on them (even for their own good), displays vicious behavior. Plato’s philosopher king is a perfect example. The philosopher king keeps the public cut off from art and fiction, tells the public untruths, but all for the sake of their own epistemic well-being. However, despite Plato’s enticing epistemic arguments, we contend that this too is epistemically vicious. It reduces network-security. It makes people less intellectually autonomous and less able to enjoy epistemic growth.

8.5 Conclusion In this paper we argued that social epistemology needs to expand its toolkit to include modal epistemic standings and epistemic virtues and vices as networked concepts. The structure of one’s epistemic network gives shape to the related virtues and the nature of modal epistemic standings. Conceptualizing modal epistemic standings and virtues as inherently networked allows us to see that safe belief is relative to one’s surrounding network, and that network-security (and belief-security) is just as important. Not only should our beliefs be safe in the current network, but also secure in nearby possible networks.

Vectors of epistemic insecurity 161 We also introduced three classes of virtues (and correlative vices) that allow us to navigate the social epistemic realm: monitoring, adjusting, and restructuring. These virtues can be both self-regarding and other-regarding. They govern the trade-offs between safety and belief-security and network-security, and are manifested in different ways depending on the structure of one’s epistemic network. Much more needs to be done to develop and find the correct balance between safety, belief-security, and network-security and between self-regarding and other-regarding considerations. What we have done here is take the first step in articulating a framework within which to expand virtue epistemology and to make social epistemology truly social.

Notes 1 Some exceptions include discussions about what it means for groups to testify (Tollefsen 2007; Lackey 2015, 2018) and discussions about which network structures are conducive to sharing knowledge within idealized communities of scientific researchers (Holman and Bruner 2015; Rosenstock et al. 2017; Zollman 2007). 2 For a socialized alternative, see Alfano and Skorburg (2017b) and Skorburg (2018). 3 Goldberg (2005) argues that milk carton suggests that there are local invariances in one’s environment that should be held fixed in determining whether someone has a safe belief. Our notion of vector-relative safety is in the spirit of Goldberg’s account, but it is more specifically tied to one’s social epistemic network. 4 See Kelly (2010) for a related discussion of independence. Kelly only considers cases in which someone is prompted to revise a belief based on disagreement with multiple (in)dependent testifiers. The more fundamental question that we address here is what a desirable testimonial network looks like in the first place. 5 A further interesting question is whether a group or network of individuals could itself count as a source. For example, when one reads The New York Times, one could treat the individual journalist whose byline appears with the article as the source of one’s knowledge. Alternatively, one could treat the Times itself as one’s source. We suspect that most groups are not sufficiently organized and structured to count as epistemic agents with the power to testify in their own right. However, this does not preclude certain groups from counting as epistemic agents and hence as sources. For more on these ideas, see Tollefsen (2007) and Fricker (2012). 6 For a discussion about buck passing and testimony, see Baker and Clark (2018). 7 There are laws against fraud, false advertising, and other types of crimes that have an epistemic dimension. However, since free speech is a cornerstone of democracy, the scope of epistemic rights recognized by the state might be more limited than the scope of political rights. For an account of epistemic rights, see Watson (2018). 8 One might wonder whether these virtues are necessary conditions for one’s true testimonial beliefs counting as knowledge. We are agnostic on that question here. At the very least, these dispositions are epistemically valuable, even if they are not necessary for knowledge.

References Alfano, M. 2013. Character as Moral Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alfano, M. 2016. “The Topology of Communities of Trust.” Russian Sociological Review, 15(4), 30–56. Alfano, M., Cunningham, S., Meulemans, W., Rutter, I., Sondag, M., Speckmann, B., & Sullivan, E. 2018. “Social Network-Epistemology.” In 2018 IEEE 14th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science), 29 Oct–1 Nov 2018, 320–321.

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Alfano, M., & Skorburg, A. 2017a. “Extended Knowledge, the Recognition Heuristic, and Epistemic Injustice.” In D. Pritchard, J. Kallestrup, O. Palermos, & A. Carter (eds.), Extended Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 239–65. Alfano, M., & Skorburg, A. 2017b. “The Embedded and Extended Character Hypotheses.” In J. Kiverstein (ed.), Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind. London: Routledge, pp. 465–78. Baehr, J. 2010. “Epistemic Malevolence.” Metaphilosophy, 41(1–2), 189–213. Baker, J., & Clark, P. 2018. “Epistemic Buck-Passing and the Interpersonal View of Testimony.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 48(2), 178–99. Battaly, H. 2008. “Virtue Epistemology.” Philosophy Compass, 3(4), 639–63. Callaway, E. 2011. “Report Finds Massive Fraud at Dutch Universities.” Nature, 479, 15. Fire, M., Katz, G., & Elovici, Y. 2012. “Strangers Intrusion Detection: Detecting Spammers and Fake Profiles in Social Networks Based on Topology Anomalies.” Human Journal, 1(1), 26–39. Freeman, L. 1978. “Centrality in Social Networks Conceptual Clarification.” Social Networks, 1(3), 215–39. Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. 2012. “Group Testimony? The Making of a Collective Good Informant.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84(2), 249–76. Gardiner, G. 2017. “Safety’s Swamp: Against the Value of Modal Stability.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 54(2), 119–29. Goldberg, S. 2005. “Testimonial Knowledge Through Unsafe Testimony.” Analysis, 65, 302–11. Goldberg, S. 2007. “How Lucky Can You Get?” Synthese, 158, 315–27. Goldman, A. I. 1976. “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge.” The Journal of Philosophy, 73(20), 771–91. Greco, J. 2010. Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holman, B., & Bruner, J. P. 2015. “The Problem of Intransigently Biased Agents.” Philosophy of Science, 82(5), 956–68. Kant, I. 1797. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. and ed. Gregor Mary. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kawall, J. 2002. “Other–Regarding Epistemic Virtues.” Ratio, 15(3), 257–75. Kelly, T. 2010. “Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence.” In R. Feldman & T. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111–74. Kelp, C. 2009. “Knowledge and Safety.” Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 21–31. Korsgaard, C. M. 2012. “A Kantian Case for Animal Rights.” In M. Michael, D. Kühne, & J. Hänni (eds.), Animal Law-Tier and Rect: Developments and Perspectives in the 21st Century. Zurich: Dike Verlag, 3–27. Krebs, V. 2002. “Mapping Networks of Terrorist Cells.” Connections, 24(3), 43–52. Lackey, J. 2018. “Group Assertion.” Erkenntnis, 83(1), 21–42. Lackey, J. A. 2015. “A Deflationary Account of Group Testimony.” In J. Lackey (ed), Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 64–95. Lackey, Jennifer. 2008. Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, N. 2017. “The Bad News About Fake News.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 6(8), 20–36.

Vectors of epistemic insecurity 163 List, C., & Goodin, R. E. 2001. “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem.” Journal of Political Philosophy, 9(3), 277–306. Marsh, E. J., Cantor, A. D., & Brashier, N. M. 2016. “Believing that Humans Swallow Spiders in Their Sleep: False Beliefs as Side Effects of the Processes that Support Accurate Knowledge.” Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 64, 93–132. Masterton, G., Olsson, E. J., & Angere, S. 2016. “Linking as Voting : How the Condorcet Jury Theorem in Political Science is Relevant to Webometrics.” Scientometrics, 106(3), 945–66. Montmarquet, J. A. 1992. Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Nozick, R. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pelling, C. 2013. “Testimony, Testimonial Belief, and Safety.” Philosophical Studies, 164(1), 205–17. Prentice, D. A., Gerrig, R. J., & Bailis, D. S. 1997. “What Readers Bring to the Processing of Fictional Texts.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4(3), 416–20. Pritchard, D. 2007. “Anti-Luck Epistemology.” Synthese, 158, 277–98. Pritchard, D. 2009. “Safety-Based Epistemology: Whither Now?” Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 33–45. Pritchard, D. 2010. “Knowledge and Understanding.” In Pritchard, Haddock, and Miller, (eds.), The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–90. Pritchard, D. 2016. “Epistemic Risk.” Journal of Philosophy, 113(11), 550–71. Rabinowitz, D. 2011. “The Safety Condition for Knowledge.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Reid, E., Qin, J., Zhou, Y., Lai, G., Sageman, M., Weimann, G., & Chen, H. 2005. “Collecting and Analyzing the Presence of Terrorists on the Web: A Case Study of Jihad Websites.” In P. Kantor, G. Muresan, F. Roberts, D. D. Zeng, F. Y. Wang, H. C. Chen, & R. C. Merkl (eds.), Intelligence and Security Informatics. Dorcrecht: Springer, 402–11. Riggs, W. 2010. “Open-Mindedness.” Metaphilosophy, 41(1–2), 172–88. Rosenstock, S., Bruner, J., & O’Connor, C. 2017. “In Epistemic Networks, Is Less Really More?” Philosophy of Science, 84(2), 234–52. Skorburg, J. A. 2018. “Where Are Virtues?” Philosophical Studies, 176(9), 2331–49. Sosa, E. 1999a. “How to Defeat Opposition to Moore.” Philosophical Perspectives, 13, 141–54. Sosa, E. 1999b. “How Must Knowledge be Modally Related to What is Known?” Philosophical Topics, 26(1–2), 373–84. Sosa, E. 2007. A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stelter, B. 2018. “Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script.” The New York Times, 2 April. Šubelj, L., Furlan, U., & Bajec, M. 2011. “An Expert System for Detecting Automobiles Insurance Fraud Using Social Network Analysis.” Expert Systems Applications, 38(1), 1039–52. Sullivan, E., & Alfano, M. 2019. “Negative Epistemic Exemplars.” In B. Sherman & S. Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 17–32. Sullivan, E., Sondag, M., Rutter, I., Meulemans, W., Cunningham, S., Speckmann, B., & Alfano, M. 2020. “Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of

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Crowds?” In T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, & S. Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy (Vol. 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 29–63. Timberg, C., Dwoskin, E., Zapotosky, M., & Barrett, D. 2018. “Facebook’s Disclosures Under Scrutiny as Federal Agencies Join Probe of Tech Giant’s Role in Sharing Data with Cambridge Analytica.” The Washington Post, 2 July. Tollefsen, D. 2007. “Group Testimony.” Social Epistemology, 21(3), 299–311. Watson, L. 2018. “Systematic Epistemic Rights Violations in the Media: A Brexit Case Study.” Social Epistemology, 32(2), 88–102. Wheeler, C., Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. 1999. “Fictional Narratives Change Beliefs: Replications of Prentice, Gerrig, and Bailis (1997) with Mixed Corroboration.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6(1), 136–41. Williamson, T. 2002. Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zagzebski, L. T., & Zagaebski, L. T. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zollman, K. J. 2007. “The Communication Structure of Epistemic Communities.” Philosophy of Science, 74(5), 574–87.

Part III

Analyses of specific vices

9

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off Heather Battaly

Compare four sets of people, all of whom have intellectual goals and all of whom encounter obstacles to achieving their goals. Members of the first set tend to abandon their intellectual goals when they hit an obstacle. They drop a class after failing the first homework assignment. They scrap an idea for a project as soon as they hear objections. They forsake a line of inquiry when it becomes boring. They abandon their goals because they don’t want to put in the effort required to achieve them. When the going gets tough, they quit. Members of the second set don’t abandon their intellectual goals when they hit an obstacle. Instead, they delay, even though they think they should act. They delay starting the final paper for the course until the night before the deadline. They postpone working on the overdue book project. They put off grading papers until they receive email warnings from the Dean’s office. They typically feel awful about delaying, but, nevertheless, delay because they don’t want to put in the effort. When the going gets tough, these folks procrastinate. Members of the third set are neither quitters nor procrastinators. When they hit an obstacle, they don’t abandon their intellectual goals. Nor do they delay against their better judgment. Instead, they avoid putting in effort in a variety of other ways. Some don’t delay at all; they move forward but avoid obstacles by skipping steps, submitting shoddy reports. Others deliberately delay and waste time, thinking it is fine to drag out straightforward assignments. Yet others simply do nothing: consider free-riders in team projects who surf on-line while everyone else works. Though this set is diverse, all of its members have something important in common: they intentionally take the easy route, knowing (or at least truly believing) their work will suffer. When the going gets tough, they slack off. In contrast with all three of the above groups, members of the fourth set put in effort to overcome the obstacles they encounter and stick with their intellectual goals. They stay in class and work hard to try to pass the next assignment. They write a rough draft of their paper well before the deadline. They work on the book project, and the grading. They try to overcome obstacles, neither avoiding them by skipping steps nor succumbing to them by doing nothing. When the going gets tough, they persevere. This chapter focuses on the traits of quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off, which are different ways to lack the trait of intellectual perseverance. It explores

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what makes the traits of quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off intellectual vices when they are. But it does not assume that these traits are always intellectual vices, and even suggests some conditions in which they might be intellectual virtues. The first section draws on recent work in virtue epistemology to provide an account of intellectual perseverance (Battaly 2017; King 2014; King 2019). It distinguishes between the trait of intellectual perseverance and the virtue that goes by the same name, arguing that the trait of intellectual perseverance is not a virtue when one has it to excess—roughly, when one doesn’t know when to quit. Sections 9.2 through 9.4 propose working definitions of the traits of quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off, as deficiencies of, or ways of lacking, the trait of intellectual perseverance. I examine why these traits are intellectual vices when they are, while leaving open the possibility that they sometimes fail to be intellectual vices and might even be intellectual virtues. The final section canvasses a number of related traits including laziness, apathy, complacency, resignation, and folly.

9.1 Intellectual perseverance Let’s begin with an analysis of the trait of intellectual perseverance, without presupposing that this trait is automatically an intellectual virtue. There are advantages to keeping these questions separate—to separating our analysis of intellectual perseverance as a character trait from our investigation into its status as an intellectual virtue. This approach can help us home in on what makes intellectual perseverance a virtue when it is one, while leaving open the possibility that it can fail to be an intellectual virtue. It is an example of what Ian James Kidd (2020) calls ‘normative contextualism.’ Normative contextualists initially conceive of intellectual character traits as normatively neutral, and then investigate what turns those neutral character traits into intellectual virtues or vices. 9.1.1 The trait So, what is the trait of intellectual perseverance (IP)? By way of introduction, it is a disposition to continue to perform intellectual actions, so as to overcome obstacles, in pursuit of one’s intellectual goals (Battaly 2017). Intellectual perseverance is a subset of general perseverance (GP), the latter of which does not restrict its goals and actions to the intellectual. Which goals are intellectual? Roughly, intellectual goals are those that aim at intellectual objects. They aim at pursuing or avoiding, among other things, knowledge, beliefs, ideas, learning, understanding, and inquiry. Agents have been known to adopt a wide variety of intellectual goals. Examples include figuring out the answer to a question, learning a language, understanding another person’s perspective, mastering a particular field of knowledge, gaining just enough knowledge to get promoted, avoiding knowledge of a subject matter at all costs, and avoiding uncomfortable ideas. Contrast these with goals that are not intellectual

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 169 per se and fall under the purview of general perseverance. Some examples include exercising more, eating better, ending one’s marriage, and spending less time with one’s family. The trait of IP allows an agent’s intellectual goals to be sub-standard. This is as it should be, since agents sometimes persevere with respect to sub-standard intellectual goals, e.g., the goals of amassing trivia about celebrities, of avoiding knowledge of anthropogenic climate change, etc. But, the trait of IP does not allow intellectual goals to be too easily achieved. It excludes goals that are so easily achieved that they don’t permit any obstacles (the goal of solving ‘1 + 1 = x’) and don’t require any effort on the part of the agent. Obstacles make it difficult for an agent to achieve her intellectual goals and require effort to overcome. Some agents will encounter obstacles, and need perseverance, where others don’t.1 To use a simple case, we can expect logic students, but not logic professors, to encounter obstacles when doing basic proofs. Accordingly, obstacles, and perseverance itself, must be indexed to the agent in question (King 2014: 3795). Obstacles can be internal or external. Internal obstacles, generated by one’s own psyche, include frustration (with a research project), boredom and drudgery (in compiling data for a monthly report), and the desire to do something easier, or more pleasurable, or less tedious. External obstacles can be generated by the environment or by the goals themselves. Some environments are rife with distraction, others with discouragement, yet others with repetitive tasks. Environments that categorically preclude an agent’s pursuit of intellectual goals or deny her the opportunity to perform intellectual actions are a limiting case. Moreover, some goals will be difficult to achieve even in hospitable environments—it is challenging to solve Russell’s paradox. Agents with the trait of IP are disposed to successfully overcome routine obstacles, such as the temptation to play video games instead of doing one’s homework. When obstacles are extremely difficult—e.g., as they are in finding a cure for AIDS—agents with IP will try to overcome them, even if they don’t succeed and never accomplish their intellectual goals. Persevering with respect to a goal is distinct from accomplishing the goal—one can persevere without completing a project, and (as we will see below) one can complete a project without persevering. Since agents and their intellectual goals and obstacles vary, the actions that agents perform (in trying) to overcome obstacles will also vary. Some standard examples include generating replies to objections, resisting the temptation to forsake a frustrating line of inquiry for something easier, and trying an alternative solution to a problem after an initial failure. Though these specific actions vary, they are all intellectual actions—roughly, voluntary actions of the mind, which may or may not manifest in observable behavior. There are two points to drive home about intellectual actions. First, the category of ‘intellectual actions’ is much broader than the category of ‘actions that agents with IP perform (in trying) to overcome obstacles.’ For starters, intellectual actions aren’t restricted to IP in any way, and are involved in all intellectual character traits. Further, guessing and jumping to conclusions are intellectual actions, but these aren’t involved in overcoming obstacles so much as in avoiding them.

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Finally, obstacles, setbacks, difficulties, and so forth need not even be on the scene for an agent to perform intellectual actions. For many adults, the intellectual actions of adding 405 + 68, and reading and understanding a few sentences in a news story (in one’s native language) pose no obstacles whatsoever. Second, the trait of IP allows an agent’s intellectual actions to be sub-standard. This is because it allows an agent’s intellectual goals to be sub-standard. Consider Hunter, an agent with the trait of IP whose goal is to avoid knowing anything about white privilege. Hunter overcomes the obstacles that he regularly encounters—evidence of white privilege in his workplace and community, speeches by world leaders that address white privilege, students in his classes who mention white privilege, talks about white privilege at his university—by ignoring them.2 He thus performs intellectual actions that an intellectually virtuous agent would not perform, in the service of a goal that an intellectually virtuous agent would not have. This brings us to the distinction between the trait of IP and the virtue of IP. 9.1.2 The virtue We have seen that the trait of IP involves staying the course—continuing to perform intellectual actions in an effort to overcome obstacles in pursuit of one’s intellectual goals. Marie Curie had the trait of IP. She ran hundreds of experiments in order to isolate a decigram of radium from several tons of pitchblende. Bertrand Russell had the trait of IP. He stared at a blank sheet of paper every day in the summers of 1903 and 1904 trying to solve, what has come to be known as, Russell’s paradox. But Albert Michelson and Edward Morley also had the trait of IP. In the late 1880s, Michelson and Morley conducted one failed experiment after another in an effort to measure the alleged phenomenon of ether drift. Rather than give up the assumption that ether existed and abandon their line of inquiry, they stayed the course. Similarly, English professor Grady Tripp—the protagonist of Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys—has the trait of IP. Tripp won’t give up on the novel he is writing, even though he has written 2,600 pages and gotten no closer to the end. Chabon himself devoted 5 years and 1,500 pages to a manuscript before abandoning it (Gorney 2010). These agents have the trait of IP, but they don’t have the intellectual virtue of IP. At least, they don’t have the intellectual virtue of IP on an Aristotelian analysis, which is one of the two dominant analyses of intellectual virtue in the literature.3 Why not? The short answer is that these agents act inappropriately because they lack good judgment. They have latched onto intellectual goals that are in fact doomed to fail, and that they should have learned were doomed to fail (given the lack of progress they had made), and have refused to give them up! They persevered even when they should have abandoned their goals. In other words, they persevered to excess, whereas Aristotelian virtue requires hitting the mean in one’s actions. Gary Watson makes a similar point about benevolence: ‘the word “benevolence” names both a general concern for others (which may be excessive, and lead to bad action) and the qualified and informed concern that constitutes the virtue’ (1984:

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 171 68). Just as an excess of the trait of benevolence can cause one to donate to an organization without considering its merit, an excess of the trait of intellectual perseverance can cause one to stick with projects that are ill-fated. It can cause one to perform actions that are characteristic of the intellectual vice of intransigence, which Nathan King describes as a disposition to ‘give up too late or not at all’ and to ‘persist in … projects long after [they] should be abandoned’ (2014: 3786). The Aristotelian virtue of IP requires good judgment about when to persevere with respect to a goal and when to abandon the goal. Good judgment reins in excess—it prevents agents from staying the course when they should quit.4 It likewise reins in deficiency—it prevents agents from quitting when they should stay the course (see below). It enables agents to hit the mean in their actions—to stay the course when it is appropriate. Unsurprisingly, it can be difficult to determine exactly when to persevere with respect to a goal and when to quit. Though it is clear that Michelson and Morley, and Tripp should have quit, most cases aren’t as easy to judge. Still, two criteria can be helpful.5 First, good judgment involves balancing the importance of a goal against the difficulty of achieving it. Some intellectual goals, like figuring out a cure for AIDS, rank high on the scale of difficulty, but also high on the scale of importance, rendering the judgment to stay the course. Other goals, such as assessing academic programs, can suffer the fate of ranking high on the scale of difficultly and low enough on the scale of importance to render the judgment to quit. The same fate awaits trivial goals—figuring out Nolan Ryan’s ERA in Tuesday-games—which rank even lower on the scale of importance. Second, good judgment factors in the agent’s skill-set and epistemic opportunity costs. Arguably, the late Toni Morrison would have amassed epistemic opportunity costs had she continued to edit the work of other black authors instead of quitting editing to write her novel Beloved. In contrast, an editor without the skill-set to write fiction, let alone an important novel, would amass epistemic opportunity costs by abandoning his editorial goals.6 There is more to the Aristotelian virtue of IP than good judgment and appropriate action. At a minimum, agents also need good motivation. Jason Baehr (2020) argues that for a character trait to be an intellectual virtue, it must be grounded in a motivation for epistemic goods, such as truth, knowledge, and understanding. In many of the agents named above—including Curie, Russell, and even Michelson and Morley—the trait of IP is grounded in a motivation for epistemic goods. Russell, for instance, overcame obstacles and stayed the course because he wanted to understand. But the same can’t be said of Hunter, who is motivated to avoid knowing anything about white privilege. When an agent’s trait of IP is driven by the motivation to protect his own views, or to win arguments, or to compete with peers, it is not an intellectual virtue.7

9.2 Quitting There are several traits that are deficiencies of, or ways of lacking, the trait of intellectual perseverance. When an agent hits obstacles to her intellectual goals,

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she might tend to quit, or procrastinate, or slack off, rather than persevere. Let’s begin with an analysis of the trait of quitting. As above, we will first propose a normatively neutral analysis of the trait, and then investigate its status as an intellectual vice. This can help us home in on what makes the trait of quitting a vice when it is one. The trait of quitting is arguably a disposition to abandon one’s intellectual goals when one hits obstacles. Quitters do not perform intellectual actions in an effort to overcome obstacles—they do not persevere. But nor do they delay action, or intentionally take the easy route, in pursuit of their goals. When they hit obstacles, they give up their intellectual goals altogether. When is quitting an intellectual vice? The answer depends on what we think intellectual vices are. Mirroring the Aristotelian analysis of virtue in Section 9.1, we might think of intellectual vices as bad intellectual character traits (Battaly 2014). So, just as intellectual virtues involve dispositions to perform appropriate intellectual actions, intellectual vices will involve dispositions to perform inappropriate intellectual actions. As we saw above, intellectual virtues also involve good judgment and good intellectual motivations. Accordingly, we can consider whether intellectual vices likewise involve bad judgment and bad intellectual motivations, like those of Hunter above, or at least the absence of good intellectual motivations, like the motivation for truth.8 With this basic structure in mind, we can investigate whether the trait of quitting is an intellectual vice. Importantly, our target is the trait, or disposition, of quitting. Dispositions are tendencies. They tell us what an agent would do, were she to encounter a particular type of situation. In this case, the disposition tells us that the agent would abandon her intellectual goals were she to encounter obstacles. To drive this point home: she would consistently abandon her intellectual goals in the face of obstacles—she wouldn’t abandon some goals but persevere with respect to most others, she would (with few exceptions) abandon them all.9 As we can glean from the discussion of obstacles above, agents often encounter obstacles to their intellectual goals, though some agents will encounter different (or more) obstacles than others. Accordingly, we can identify quitters by looking for agents who consistently abandon their intellectual goals when they hit obstacles. These agents give up their intellectual projects whenever the going gets tough. They drop their classes as soon as the material gets challenging. They scrap ideas for projects upon sensing the first whiff of criticism. They forsake lines of inquiry the moment they become boring or tedious. And they behave in these ways over and over again. Granted, these agents also quit intellectual projects that should be abandoned. They quit the projects of measuring ether drift, of writing (ill-conceived) novels, and of computing Nolan Ryan’s ERA in Tuesday-games. Some of their acts of quitting end up being appropriate (albeit unwittingly). Nevertheless, we can expect the vast majority of their acts of quitting to be inappropriate. Provided that they generally adopt goals that are appropriate for them—provided that their classes, ideas for projects, etc., aren’t ill-fated, and are sufficiently important and suited to their skill-sets—these agents are quitting when they shouldn’t.

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 173 Their actions do not match those of people with the virtue of IP, who would stick with the aforementioned goals, striving to overcome the challenging material, the whiffs of criticism, and the tedium. Instead, their actions match those of a person with the vice of irresolution, which in King’s words, involves ‘a disposition to give up too early on one’s intellectual projects in the face of obstacles’ (2014: 3786). In short, provided that there is nothing wrong with an agent’s intellectual goals, the disposition to quit will be a disposition to perform inappropriate intellectual actions.10 Suppose that agents generally adopt intellectual goals that are appropriate for them (our goals at, e.g., school and work tend to be appropriate). Does this mean that the disposition to quit is an intellectual vice? It, at least, means that quitting is not an intellectual virtue, since intellectual virtues require dispositions of appropriate intellectual action. By itself, is the disposition to perform inappropriate actions enough to make quitting an intellectual vice? That is an open question for vice epistemologists. But factoring in the motivations of quitters can help tip the scales. Suppose that the quitters above abandon their intellectual goals because they don’t want to put in the effort to overcome obstacles. As Kidd remarks, ‘a person may not care enough … to put in the epistemic work’ (2017: 15). Quitters may not care enough about epistemic goods to put in the effort it takes to acquire them—their motivation for epistemic goods may be deficient (Crerar 2018: 758). Accordingly, even if their disposition to perform inappropriate actions isn’t sufficient for vice on its own, that disposition combined with a lack of appropriate motivation makes a stronger case for vice-possession. Is the disposition to quit ever an intellectual virtue? For starters, we can reiterate that an individual act of quitting can be appropriate even when the general disposition to quit would be a vice. Case in point: Michelson and Morley should have abandoned their goal of measuring ether drift; here, it was appropriate to quit. Similarly, it can be appropriate for an agent to abandon a difficult intellectual goal whose importance is low or whose continued pursuit would produce epistemic opportunity costs. In short, it can be appropriate to quit a particular project, even when a general disposition to quit would be a vice. So, are there any conditions in which this general disposition would be an intellectual virtue? Here is a suggestion. Imagine an inhospitable epistemic environment, in which agents are systematically prevented from pursuing appropriate intellectual goals. Agents usually only have opportunities to pursue intellectual goals that are illfated or trivial, and don’t get to pursue goals that are important.11 We could think of such cases along the lines of demon-worlds, in which agents only ever get to pursue goals to square the circle or to amass knowledge of celebrities. But it might be more useful to recall the ways in which women have been, and in some places continue to be, systematically excluded from formal education and directed toward more trivial topics. When women are prevented from studying subjects such as mathematics, literature, history, and science, and directed to trivial subjects (e.g., the truths of conventional etiquette),12 the general disposition to quit starts to look less like an intellectual vice and more like a virtue. It might be appropriate to quit the trivial intellectual projects into which one has been channeled.

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On the assumption that those are (with few exceptions) the only projects to be had, the general disposition to quit would then be a disposition of appropriate intellectual action. By itself, that isn’t enough to make it an intellectual character virtue. The agents in question would at least need to be motivated to quit because they cared about and wanted to pursue more important truths. Crucially, they would also need good judgment—which would prevent them from quitting on the rare occasion when goals were appropriate. Though we still need further details, I hope to have taken us some way toward conditions in which quitting might count as an intellectual virtue. In Orwellian scenarios, quitting might even count as a virtue of resistance.13

9.3 Procrastinating When procrastinators hit obstacles, they don’t abandon their intellectual goals. They aren’t quitters. But nor do they continue to perform intellectual actions in pursuit of their goals—they don’t persevere either. Instead, they delay acting in pursuit of their goals. Following the procedure above, we will first propose a normatively neutral analysis of the trait of procrastinating, which distinguishes it from the traits of perseverance and quitting. We will then investigate its evaluative status as an intellectual vice. 9.3.1 The trait The trait of procrastination is arguably a disposition to intentionally delay acting in pursuit of intellectual goals that one believes one should be actively pursuing. Specifically, it is a disposition to do this when one hits obstacles. Let’s explore four key features of this working definition. First, unlike quitters, people with the trait of procrastination hold onto their intellectual goals when they encounter obstacles. They put off acting in pursuit of their intellectual goals, but they do not abandon them.14 Sarah Stroud (2010: 65) insightfully argues that these goals can be vague and unspecific—one need not have a well-developed goal in order to count as procrastinating. Indeed, one can have a vague goal, like writing a grant proposal ‘sometime this year,’ and procrastinate with respect to making more specific plans to achieve it. The point is that procrastination requires having an intellectual goal of some sort: one must have a goal with respect to x in order to count as procrastinating with respect to x. Second, when procrastinators hit obstacles, they intentionally delay acting in pursuit of their intellectual goals. This means that though they have the time and opportunity to act, they intentionally avoid acting now, and typically, intend to act later. This also means that people who fall behind need not be procrastinators. An analogy from professional cycling may be helpful. Cyclists in an arduous multi-stage race like the Tour de France can fall behind even when they are cycling as fast as they can. Falling behind in, e.g., writing a book, is consistent with persevering—with overcoming obstacles and continuing to act in pursuit of that goal—and does not entail any intentional delay in acting.

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 175 Third, according to our working definition, intentionally delaying action in pursuit of a goal is not sufficient for procrastination. Suppose Daphne has simultaneous looming deadlines: one for a publication on which she knows she has much left to do, and the other for an update of an extant letter of recommendation, which she knows will take her less than an hour. She does not procrastinate when she intentionally delays working on the letter in order to make progress on the publication. Some cases of intentionally delayed action are simply exercises of good time-management. In Stroud’s words, ‘procrastination cannot be equated with putting something off’ (2010: 53). Procrastination requires a further condition. Which condition? This brings us to our fourth key feature. According to our working definition, to procrastinate, an agent must intentionally delay acting in pursuit of goals that she believes she should be actively pursuing. Thus, Daphne didn’t procrastinate in working on the letter because she didn’t believe that she should have been working on it. Note that on our definition, an agent who should in fact be actively pursuing a particular goal, but doesn’t herself believe this, is not procrastinating. But why not claim that agents procrastinate whenever they should in fact be actively pursuing their goals, whether or not they believe this? On that analysis, Daphne didn’t procrastinate because she should not, in fact, have been working on the letter. Since there is disagreement in the literature over which of these conditions to adopt, our working definition requires further defense. Let’s begin defending it by laying out three different proposals: the first—our working definition—has a subjective bent, the second has an objective bent, the third combines these. Subjective proposal: procrastination is a disposition to intentionally delay acting in pursuit of intellectual goals that one believes one should be actively pursuing. Objective proposal: procrastination is a disposition to intentionally delay acting in pursuit of intellectual goals that one should in fact be actively pursuing. Combined proposal: procrastination is a disposition to intentionally delay acting in pursuit of intellectual goals that one believes one should be actively pursuing and that one should in fact be actively pursuing. Situating these in the literature, Stroud (2010: 57) endorses a version of the subjective proposal. Christine Tappolet (2010: 121) ascribes the objective proposal—what she calls ‘blind procrastination’—to Chrisoula Andreou’s (2007: 183) analysis of procrastination as delaying ‘what one should—relative to one’s ends and information—have done sooner.’ Duncan MacIntosh (2010) arguably endorses the combined proposal.15 Why isn’t the objective proposal correct? For starters, the condition in the objective proposal isn’t sufficient for procrastination. An agent can satisfy that condition—she can intentionally delay acting in pursuit of goals that she should in fact be actively pursuing—without procrastinating. To see why, consider the following case. Optimistic Opal has been assigned a new course to teach next semester. Suppose it will take her a considerable amount of time to design a

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syllabus for the course—she should, in fact, start working on it soon. But Opal doesn’t realize this—she is overly optimistic about her ability to design the syllabus and she under-estimates the obstacles. Opal thus believes, albeit falsely, that she can put off work on the syllabus until the weekend before the semester begins. Accordingly, she delays working on it. Though Opal intentionally delays acting in pursuit of one of her intellectual goals, and though this is a goal that she should in fact be actively pursuing, she isn’t procrastinating. She isn’t procrastinating because she doesn’t think she needs to work on the syllabus. To put the point differently, her problem isn’t procrastination, it is mistaken belief, specifically the mistaken belief that she shouldn’t be working on the syllabus. We can even assume that Opal would have started working on the syllabus had she realized that she should have. Had her beliefs been correct, Opal wouldn’t have delayed. Opal has a problem alright, but the objective proposal misdiagnoses it. For Opal’s problem to be procrastination, she would need to believe that she should have been working on the syllabus. Procrastination requires a conflict between what one believes one should do, and what one actually does or fails to do. We need this subjective condition in order to avoid misdiagnosing the problem. Taking it on board thus gives us a conceptual advantage over the objective proposal. Taking the subjective condition on board likewise gives us an explanatory advantage: it explains the awful feelings of regret that typically accompany procrastination, whereas the objective proposal does not. Now, you might agree that the objective condition isn’t sufficient for procrastination and that some sort of subjective condition is necessary, but you might worry that the details of the subjective condition above aren’t quite right. Specifically, you might worry that procrastinators don’t need to believe that they should be actively pursuing a goal. (1) Can’t someone procrastinate in coming to have such a belief in the first place? (2) Don’t some procrastinators deceive themselves into believing that they shouldn’t be actively pursuing their goals? Regarding the first worry, consider a teenager who has the goal of applying to college, but puts off thinking about this goal, and never forms the belief that she should be working on college applications. Our teenager should have formed that belief (and would have, had she given the matter sufficient thought), but didn’t. So, the worry is that our teenager is procrastinating in delaying work on her applications, even though she doesn’t believe that she should be working on them. My response is to hold the line. Our teenager does have a problem, but it isn’t yet the problem of procrastination. It looks like procrastination because her actions match those of a procrastinator, but her psychology is different—she doesn’t think she is doing anything wrong and doesn’t feel regret. Her problem is instead one of negligence, which might ultimately be rooted in laziness or apathy. We can put things off for lots of ‘reasons,’ many of which are not as psychologically complex as procrastination. Let’s move to the second worry: can the subjective condition allow for cases of procrastination that involve self-deception? That could depend on what selfdeception entails. Suppose self-deception entails holding contradictory beliefs. Suppose I intentionally delay working on a publication with an imminent deadline

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 177 because I have deluded myself, at some level, into thinking that other projects are more important; nevertheless I retain the implicit belief that I really should be working on the publication—when it comes time to request an extension, I curse myself, admitting that I knew all along that I should have been working on it. The subjective condition above does count this as a case of procrastination, since I still (implicitly) believe that I should be working on the publication. So far, so good for our subjective condition. But what if self-deception does not entail an implicit belief that I should be working on the publication? What if I initially delay action while believing that I should be working on the publication, but then utterly and completely delude myself into believing that it can wait? Since my belief that I should be working on it has been entirely eradicated, our subjective condition won’t count this as a case of procrastination. But is that the wrong result? Perhaps not. Perhaps, in changing beliefs, my problem also changes—it morphs from being a problem of procrastination to being one of self-deception—in which case, our subjective condition, once again, gets the right result. Still, it might be hard to shake the intuition that our teenager and our selfdeceiver are procrastinating, in which case, we might need to tinker with our subjective condition. I encourage future tinkering. In the meantime, I will be defending the subjective condition, keeping in mind that amendments might be forthcoming. Should we combine the subjective condition with the objective condition, plumping for the combined proposal? Or should we endorse the subjective proposal on its own? For an agent to procrastinate, must she correctly believe that she should be acting? Or would any belief that she should be acting—even a false one—suffice for procrastination? I will be plumping for the subjective proposal—our working definition—and arguing against the combined proposal. We should reject the combined proposal because the objective condition isn’t necessary for procrastination either. Agents can procrastinate with respect to a project even when they shouldn’t in fact be working on it. In other words, agents can falsely believe that they should be working and still be procrastinating. To see why, consider the case of Mona, who has been assigned the task of writing her organization’s next quarterly report. Mona has never done a task like this before, and needs to find out what the report requires in order to complete it. She assumes that the report will require a considerable amount of work on her part, and thus believes that she should start working on it soon. She puts a reminder in her calendar to investigate the requirements of the report. Still, she dreads getting started because of the onerous work she thinks the report will demand. When the reminder pops up, she delays it, feeling regret and anxiety about doing so. Mona intentionally delays acting in pursuit of an intellectual goal that she believes she should be actively pursuing. Thus far, she meets the condition in the subjective proposal, which is also a condition in the combined proposal. Now suppose that she doesn’t meet the objective condition in the combined proposal. It turns out that the report isn’t onerous, it will be easy for Mona to complete, and she has plenty of time. Given the other intellectual

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projects currently in her inbox, Mona’s belief that she should be actively working on the report is false. Does Mona still count as procrastinating? I submit that she does. She is intentionally putting off working on an intellectual project that she believes she should be working on. As a ‘bonus,’ she feels badly about it. Her belief that she should be working on the report doesn’t need to be true for her to be procrastinating. It doesn’t need to be a fact that she should be working on it. Relatedly, consider agents who (despite empirical evidence to the contrary)16 really do produce their best work under pressure. Suppose one such agent, Milton, delays working on a paper, while believing he should be working on it, and feeling terribly about failing to work on it. (Assume Milton doesn’t realize that he excels under pressure.)17 He nevertheless produces a marvelous paper at the last minute. Given Milton’s ability to excel under pressure, working on the paper wasn’t pressing for him—he had plenty of time. We can thus assume that Milton’s belief that he should have been working on the paper was false: as a matter of fact, given his other intellectual commitments, he should not have been working on the paper. Nevertheless, he was procrastinating.18 By way of comparison, Mona and Milton do have something in common with Opal. All of them have mistaken beliefs. But Mona and Milton mistakenly believe that they should be working on their projects, whereas Opal mistakenly believes that she shouldn’t be working on hers. As a result, Mona and Milton have a problem that Opal doesn’t have—they are procrastinating, and she is not.19 We can point out a further difference between them. I have been assuming that Opal, and Mona and Milton, are all disposed to intentionally delay action. Opal is disposed to do so because she is disposed to over-estimate her abilities and under-estimate obstacles. Mona and Milton are disposed to do so because they tend to delay action when they think a project will be onerous. The difference is this: Opal’s delays of action can be ‘fixed’ wholesale by correcting her beliefs, but Mona’s and Milton’s can’t. Granted, correcting their beliefs can fix their delays of action when they falsely believe that they should act. But Mona and Milton will also delay action when they truly believe that they should act. To put the point differently, we can’t fix procrastination simply by correcting an agent’s beliefs because there will be plenty of cases in which agents procrastinate while knowing (and truly believing) that they should be acting! When students (or professors) procrastinate in writing papers until the night before the deadline, they typically know (and truly believe) that they should have started earlier. The point of the previous paragraph is that procrastination doesn’t require such beliefs to be true: one can procrastinate even when one should not in fact be working on a project. But, of course, one can also procrastinate when one should in fact be working on a project and knows this full well. 9.3.2 Vice, akrasia, and virtue In the last section, I argued that the trait of procrastination is a disposition to intentionally delay acting in pursuit of an intellectual goal that one believes one should be actively pursuing (whether that belief is true or false). We have seen

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 179 that procrastinators postpone working on book projects, quarterly reports, and grading, and put off writing papers until the last minute. They delay as soon as the going gets tough. And they delay while believing they should be actively pursuing their projects. Is the trait of procrastination, so described, an intellectual vice? Here, too, the answer depends on what intellectual vices are. Suppose that intellectual vices are bad character traits that at least involve dispositions to perform inappropriate intellectual actions. Are procrastinators disposed to act inappropriately? I submit that they are, provided that they tend to procrastinate with respect to intellectual goals that they should, in fact, be actively pursuing. In other words, they will be disposed to act inappropriately, provided that they tend to procrastinate with respect to goals that they correctly believe they should be actively pursuing. Thus, agents whose trait of procrastination ranges widely over, e.g., pressing book projects, papers, grading, and the like are acting inappropriately. Their actions do not match those of people with the virtue of IP, who would be working on these projects. This means that procrastination with respect to goals one should in fact be actively pursuing isn’t an intellectual virtue. But, by itself, the disposition to perform inappropriate intellectual actions may not be enough to make such procrastination an intellectual vice. As we suggested above, intellectual vices might also involve bad motivation and bad judgment. So, do the motivations of procrastinators tip the scales toward vice? Quintessential procrastinators retain some motivation for epistemic goods—they care about truth more than quitters do and enough to stick with their projects. Nevertheless, their epistemic motivations are deficient. They ultimately care more about avoiding the effort, or perceived effort, it would take to work on a project than they do about pursuing truth. Their deficient motivations are weak enough to disqualify them from virtue, but are they weak enough to qualify them for vice? And what about their judgment? Procrastinators who correctly believe that they should be acting arguably have good judgment rather than bad. Concerns like these led Aristotle to distinguish between vice and akrasia (weakness of will). On his view, ‘akrasia is not vice … for akrasia is contrary to choice while vice is in accordance with choice’ (NE.1151a6–7). For starters, this means that akratic people act contrary to their beliefs about what they should do. More specifically, Aristotle argues that akratic people know what they should do (their beliefs are true), and want to act appropriately, but also have competing appetites which outweigh their desires to act appropriately (NE.1151a21–24). Consequently, they act inappropriately and regret it. Aristotle thinks that unlike akratic people, vicious people act in accordance with what they believe they should do. But, since vicious people have false beliefs about what that is, they too act inappropriately, though with conviction and without regret (NE.1150a18–21). We need not endorse every detail of Aristotle’s analysis of vice. For present purposes, it is enough that a distinction between akrasia and vice can be drawn. This distinction can help us diagnose procrastinators who correctly believe that they should be actively pursuing their goals. These procrastinators have good

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judgment, or at least true beliefs about what they should do. Their desires for truth are likewise outweighed by their desires to avoid effort, resulting in inappropriate delays, which they regret. Accordingly, I submit that these procrastinators are akratic, even if they aren’t vicious.20 Given the analysis above, could the trait of procrastination ever be an intellectual virtue? Arguably, some individual acts of procrastinating will be conditionally appropriate. Recall Mona and Milton who falsely believed that they should have been acting in pursuit of their goals. Mona and Milton ended up doing the right thing: given their other intellectual projects, it was appropriate for them to delay action. On the condition that their beliefs were false—the quarterly report and the paper were not in fact pressing—their individual acts of procrastinating were appropriate. Suppose we are willing to go that far. What happens when we then try to generalize from individual acts to a stable disposition? The short answer is that we end up with cases of ‘inverse akrasia’ rather than virtue.21 We can generate cases where procrastination involves a general disposition to act appropriately, but these cases come at a cost. In them, agents will be disposed to have false beliefs about what they should do. They will have terrible judgment, which ensures that their delays will be appropriate, but disqualifies them from virtue. Given its ties to akrasia, the trait of procrastination isn’t likely to be an intellectual character virtue. But there is a different way of thinking about intellectual virtues, and here procrastination might stand a better chance. Instead of conceiving of intellectual virtues as character traits that require dispositions of appropriate intellectual action, good judgment, and the motivation for truth, we can conceive of them as qualities that reliably produce good epistemic effects. On this analysis, intellectual virtues are qualities that reliably produce true beliefs and knowledge.22 We can add further good effects to this traditional list, such as capitalizing on epistemic opportunities, and completing worthwhile intellectual projects. John Perry (2012) seems to be thinking of ‘structured procrastination’ along these lines. He argues that structured procrastinators are those who complete a range of ‘difficult, timely, and important tasks’ that they wouldn’t have otherwise completed, as a way of avoiding work on projects that are even more important (2012: 3). Structured procrastinators, unlike quitters, get a lot of important work done—they reliably produce good epistemic effects. Still, Perry admits that much procrastination is not structured and leads to bad results. The psychological literature (Kim and Seo 2015) confirms that procrastination tends to produce bad epistemic effects. It produces work that contains omissions and mistakes—or at the very least, work that is less careful, less thorough, and less insightful than it would have been, had the agent persevered. So the trait of procrastination won’t be an easy fit for effects-based virtue either, and is instead a likely candidate for effects-based vice. Nevertheless, there will be inhospitable epistemic environments where the general disposition to procrastinate will produce better epistemic effects than the trait of IP. Consider the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984, where most intellectual projects aim at generating and disseminating falsehoods. Here, the general

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 181 disposition to procrastinate will at least slow the production of bad epistemic effects. In this environment, we would recommend the general disposition to procrastinate over the general disposition of IP, even if we weren’t willing to count procrastination as an outright effects-virtue. We would likewise recommend the general disposition to quit, which will produce even better epistemic effects than procrastination. In Oceania, the disposition to quit intellectual projects might be our least bad option.

9.4 Slacking off Finally, let’s address a third way of lacking the trait of intellectual perseverance: slacking off. The trait of slacking off is arguably a disposition to intentionally take an easy path in pursuit of one’s intellectual goals, knowing (or at least truly believing) that one’s work will suffer. Whereas people with the trait of IP are disposed to overcome obstacles, people with the trait of slacking off are disposed to avoid them, or succumb to them. Importantly, agents can slack off without quitting or procrastinating. Agents who slack off need not abandon their intellectual goals, when they hit an obstacle. Students can intentionally take an easy path in completing assignments without quitting—perhaps because they still want to pass and graduate, even if they don’t care much about the assignments themselves. Likewise, one can intentionally take an easy path without delaying action at all, or without doing so against one’s better judgment. One can slack off because one thinks a goal isn’t important enough to be actively pursuing. So, slacking off does not imply procrastinating either.23 Perhaps what goes ‘slack’ in cases of slacking off is the agent’s degree of commitment to her goals: in slacking off, her motivation to pursue her goals, or her valuing of them, is reduced. There are four key features of this working definition. First, slacking off requires intentionally taking an easy path, knowing (or at least truly believing) that one’s work will suffer. Intentionally taking an easy path isn’t, by itself, sufficient for slacking off. Sometimes taking the easy path is a mark of efficiency! To slack off, one must intentionally take an easy path, knowing (or at least truly believing) that this will reduce the quality or rate of one’s work. Second, slacking off requires the intention to take an easy path, and the belief that one’s work will suffer. This means that agents who take an easy path without intending to do so, or without believing their work will suffer, are not slacking off. Consider the freshman student who doesn’t include a thesis statement in her first university-level paper because she didn’t know one was needed. Suppose she was never asked to write a thesis statement in high school, and her current professor never mentioned that the paper required a thesis statement. In writing a ‘stream of consciousness’ paper, our freshman skipped an important step, avoided an obstacle, took (what was for her) an easy route, and produced a flawed paper. But she didn’t intend to do any of this and didn’t believe her paper would be flawed—she simply didn’t know that a thesis statement was required. Indeed, we can assume that had she known this, she would have worked hard to generate a

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thesis statement. She wouldn’t have avoided the obstacle of generating one; she would have persevered in trying to overcome that obstacle. Our freshman has a problem, but it isn’t slacking off, it is ignorance about the required components of a university-level paper. Like Opal above, whose delays of action can be fixed wholesale by correcting her beliefs, our freshman’s stepskipping can be fixed wholesale by supplying her with knowledge.24 But slacking off isn’t the kind of problem that can be fixed by a shot of knowledge. Agents who slack off already know (or truly believe) that they are taking an easy path and that their work will suffer. One might object that these conditions make our definition of slacking off too narrow. They only get the right answer about our freshman because she couldn’t have been expected to know that she was taking an easy path or that her work would suffer. Our conditions exclude agents who should have known that they were taking an easy path, or that their work would suffer, but didn’t. Here, too, my response is to hold the line. These agents do have a problem, but it isn’t slacking off. Their problem is negligent ignorance, which may ultimately be rooted in apathy or laziness. This brings us to the third key feature. Slacking off requires succeeding in taking an easy path, and actually reducing the quality or rate of one’s work. This means that agents who intend to take an easy path and believe their work will suffer, but do not actually succeed in taking an easy path or in reducing the quality of their work, are not slacking off. Suppose it is your job to write the department’s assessment report. Given the looming deadlines of your other intellectual projects—preparing a presentation, finishing an article—you intend to take an easy path in analyzing the assessment data, fully aware that this will reduce the quality of your report. But, because of your perfectionist tendencies, you don’t actually take an easy path—you end up running multiple analyses of the data, and even consult the stats department. You don’t skip steps, as is your intention. I submit that you aren’t slacking off. You are trying to slack off, but failing: some agents can’t produce C-level work even when they intend to.25 Let’s turn to the fourth key feature of slacking off. There are different ways to take an easy path, some of which involve avoiding obstacles and others of which involve succumbing to them. For instance, agents can take an easy path by step-skipping, phoning it in, wasting time, or free riding. As rough sketches, consider Stan the step-skipper and Philippa who phones it in. Both intentionally circumvent obstacles. Suppose Stan and Philippa are each preparing to teach modules on ethics in their intro courses; Stan for the first time, Philippa for the tenth. Stan intentionally takes an easy path by not including detailed analyses of any ethical theories. He knows that good modules include such analyses and that his module will suffer, but he wants to avoid the work it will take to produce them. Instead, he relies on easy platitudes (‘The Golden Rule’), intentionally skips detailed analysis, and delivers a shoddy module. Philippa intentionally takes an easy path by using the same class lectures she used last year. These may already contain appropriately detailed and updated analyses of the major ethical theories—Philippa needn’t have skipped any steps. Nevertheless, using last year’s

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 183 lectures poses no obstacles for her—it is easy for her to do, given her abilities. Now add that Philippa knows she could make the module better with further revisions. But, since she wants to avoid the effort it will take to improve the module, she intentionally phones it in. (On whether this can be virtuous, see below.) Next, consider Tim the time-waster and Frida the free rider, both of whom intentionally take paths that allow them to succumb to obstacles. Tim intentionally takes ages to complete straightforward projects, knowing that this will reduce his rate of work (and prevent him from being assigned further or more difficult tasks).26 Though he has the ability and opportunity to complete projects quickly, he intentionally drags them out so as to make minimal effort (now and in the future), succumbing to boredom and other internal obstacles along the way. Tim spends most of his working hours wasting time on social media. Note that time-wasters need not be procrastinators—time-wasters may believe that it is fine to drag tasks out. Frida the free rider also succumbs to obstacles. She intentionally relies on the other members of her team to overcome obstacles, and doesn’t contribute any effort to do so herself. Frida knows that this burdens the team and will reduce the quality of their work. In sum, all four of the above agents intentionally take an easy path, and all four slack off according to our working definition. None perseveres. Is the trait of slacking off, so described, an intellectual vice? Like quitting, slacking off will involve a disposition of inappropriate action, provided that agents generally adopt goals that are appropriate for them. In short, if an agent’s intellectual goals (e.g., at school and work) tend to be appropriate for her, then her disposition to slack off will issue inappropriate actions. Her actions won’t match those of people with the virtue of IP, who would confront and (try to) overcome obstacles rather than circumvent or succumb to them. Nor will her motivations match those of people with the virtue of IP, if she slacks off because she doesn’t care enough about truth. Indeed, agents who slack off might only care about truth for its instrumental value—they might only maintain their intellectual goals because quitting would get them kicked out of school or fired. The previous paragraph makes a case for slacking off as an intellectual character vice. Slacking off with respect to goals that are appropriate might also be an effects-vice (producing a preponderance of bad epistemic effects), particularly when it comes to skipping steps. Step-skippers, who are (e.g.) running medical tests on a patient, can easily end up with more false beliefs than true ones. While wasting time, phoning it in, and free riding can also produce false beliefs, they may be more likely to inhibit the overall quality and number of truths produced. Time-wasters who succeed in producing truths might have produced even more, had they persevered. Similarly, free riding and phoning it in can result in less insightful truths than perseverance would have produced. Could the trait of slacking off be an intellectual virtue? Importantly, some individual acts of slacking off will be appropriate—slacking off can be the right thing to do when one has other intellectual goals with higher priority. If you have hard deadlines for an important publication, grading, and the assessment report, then it is appropriate to phone in the assessment report. If you didn’t phone it in, you would be amassing epistemic opportunity costs. As John Perry (2012: 20) puts the

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point: ‘You must ask yourself some questions: How useful would a perfect job be here? How much more useful would it be than a merely adequate job? Or even a half-assed job?’ Indeed, if Philippa’s ethics module is already in good shape, it can be appropriate for her to phone it in, given that she has other more important projects with pressing deadlines. Philippa may even have hit the point of diminishing epistemic returns on the ethics module, and may phone it in because she wants to devote energy to other more pressing projects. Are there any conditions in which a general disposition to slack off would be an intellectual virtue? Like its brethren, the disposition to slack off will come closest to being an intellectual virtue in inhospitable epistemic environments, where trivial or deceitful intellectual projects are the only ones on offer. In such environments, we will recommend slacking off over IP, even if we aren’t willing to count slacking off as an outright intellectual virtue. To explicate, slacking off—wasting time—will produce better epistemic effects in Orwell’s Oceania than IP, even if it falls short of producing a preponderance of good epistemic effects and, thus, isn’t an outright effects-virtue. We may likewise advise agents who are stuck doing trivial projects to slack off—to phone them in—rather than persevere, even if slacking off falls short of an outright intellectual character virtue. I note that quitting is arguably a better candidate for intellectual virtue in inhospitable environments than either procrastinating or slacking off. For those of us who are stuck in inhospitable environments, quitting may be our best bet.

9.5 Some related traits I have argued that the traits of quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off are deficiencies of intellectual perseverance. The trait of IP is a disposition to continue to perform intellectual actions, so as to overcome obstacles, in pursuit of one’s intellectual goals. By contrast, quitting is a disposition to abandon one’s intellectual goals, slacking off is a disposition to intentionally take an easy path in pursuing them, knowing (truly believing) that one’s work will suffer, and procrastinating is a disposition to intentionally delay acting in pursuit of goals that one believes one should be actively pursuing. I have identified some conditions that make quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off intellectual vices (or in the case of procrastination, akratic), while also suggesting that they might approximate intellectual virtues in inhospitable epistemic environments. This means, contra Aristotelianism, that there are several vices of deficiency associated with the virtue of IP. In closing, we can begin to map a genealogy of related traits: apathy, folly, complacency, and resignation.27 Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off don’t entail any of these. Agents can quit, procrastinate, or slack off when they care about their intellectual goals, exercise excellent judgment about them, and know their intellectual limitations and strengths. For instance, I may care about my current book project, know that the topic is worthwhile and that I should be working on it, know my strengths and limitations, and still slack off because I am lazy. Laziness arguably involves not making an effort to overcome obstacles to an intellectual goal because one doesn’t care enough about the goal to make the effort.28 I slack

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 185 off because it is hard to write a book, and (right now at least) I care more about watching TV than I do about putting in the work required to start the next chapter. In contrast with laziness, apathy arguably involves not caring enough to adopt intellectual goals in the first place. As Jason Kawall puts the point, ‘the paradigm apathetic person … fails to value or concern herself with the … project at all’ (2006: 349).29 Arguably, folly is a way of exercising bad judgment with respect to intellectual goals, e.g., of falsely believing that appropriate goals are inappropriate (or vice-versa).30 Complacency and resignation arguably involve over-estimating and under-estimating (respectively) one’s intellectual strengths. For Kawall, complacency involves an ‘overestimate of one’s accomplishments’ which produces ‘excessive self-satisfaction’ and ‘an insufficiently strong desire … to maintain … an appropriate level of accomplishment’ which, in turn, yields a lack of appropriate action (2006: 345).31 These traits do prevent agents from having the virtue of IP. To explicate, folly and resignation can cause agents to quit projects that are appropriate for them. Apathy can cause agents to fail to adopt and pursue such projects in the first place. Finally, complacency can cause agents to inappropriately delay acting, or fail to perform further actions, in pursuit of such projects.32 But cultivating the virtue of IP isn’t the best way to correct these traits. Arguably, apathy is best corrected by curiosity, folly by good judgment, complacency by intellectual humility, and resignation by intellectual pride. Cultivating the virtue of IP is, arguably, the best way to correct laziness, and the best way to correct vicious quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off that result from laziness. My hope is that this essay will help to generate further analysis of all of these traits, and of their connections to one another and to the virtue of intellectual perseverance.33

Notes 1 Privileged agents who encounter relatively few obstacles may fail to realize that oppressed persons encounter significantly more. Privileged agents should thus be cautious in ascribing vicious forms of quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off to others. 2 Lest readers think that these aren’t obstacles and ignoring evidence is always easy, Medina argues that some perspectives ‘require an enormous amount of effort to be hidden and ignored’ (2013: 34–35). 3 Advocates include Baehr (2011); Montmarquet (1993); and Zagzebski (1996). The Aristotelian analysis is also called ‘virtue-responsibilism.’ The other dominant analysis is ‘virtue-reliabilism.’ 4 The good judgment described above is a manifestation of phronesis (practical wisdom), which enables agents to hit the mean in their actions. 5 For further analysis of good judgment, see King (2014: 3787–3789); King (2019: 261– 264). 6 Editorial goals are intellectual ones. They are other-directed, aiming at authors and the dissemination of their work. 7 For further analysis of the intellectual virtue of IP, see Battaly (2017); King (2014); King (2019). 8 See Crerar (2018); Tanesini (2018); Baehr (2020). On my view, agents need not be blameworthy for possessing intellectual vices. 9 Trait possession can be a matter of degree—a person can be a quitter to a greater or lesser degree. A person who usually quits, even if she doesn’t invariably quit, can still

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count as possessing the trait of quitting, provided that possessing the trait involves meeting or exceeding a threshold. See Swanton (2003: 24). Of course, an agent might have moral reasons to quit an intellectual project that outweigh her intellectual reasons to continue. Our baseline shifts from the default assumption that agents generally adopt appropriate intellectual goals to the default assumption that agents generally adopt inappropriate intellectual goals. Thanks to Ian James Kidd for noticing a connection to Astell (1697). For instance, in a repressive, government-sponsored curriculum that re-writes history, quitting one’s courses might be a virtue of resistance for students. Tenenbaum (2010: 144) likewise distinguishes between ‘irresolution’ and procrastination. MacIntosh (2010: 69) argues that procrastination is ‘imprudent delay, where one puts off until tomorrow what one admits would … be better done today.’ Kim and Seo (2015). Milton’s belief that he should be working on the paper may even be unjustified. Compare Milton*, who has learned over decades of work that he excels under pressure. Milton* does intentionally delay working on the article, but because he knows himself well, he doesn’t believe that he should be working on the article (nor does he feel badly about delaying). Like Daphne, he doesn’t procrastinate. Does the subjective proposal cast the net too widely? Suppose you are overcommitted with many goals and falsely (and unjustifiedly) believe that you should be actively pursuing them all. You also intentionally delay acting in pursuit of all but one of them. Are you still procrastinating with respect to the rest? I think so: such agents have several problems, one of which is procrastination. See also Baker (2010). Aristotle considers such cases at NE.1146a26–30. On inverse akrasia, see Bennett (1974) and Arpaly (2003: 75). This is the view known as ‘virtue-reliabilism.’ Advocates include Sosa (2007) and Greco (2010). We can leave open the question of whether quitting implies slacking off. Procrastinating will not imply slacking off because slacking off requires that one succeed in taking an easy path whereas procrastinating does not. Mona (above) is procrastinating, but on the assumption that she is working on her other projects, she is not slacking off. Relatedly, intentionally taking an easy path that in fact reduces the quality of one’s work isn’t sufficient for slacking off. Agents can meet those conditions while (falsely) believing that they are being efficient. Such agents have mistaken beliefs, but they are not slacking off. Alternatively, consider an agent who succeeds in taking an easy path, fulfilling that intention. But her belief that her work will suffer is false. This agent is (unwittingly) being efficient, not slacking off (though she has a mistaken belief). See also King (2014: 3789) on lollygaggers. We might also consider the traits of haste and patience. See Dolin and Baehr (ms); Kawall (forthcoming); Locke (1706, sect. 25). On laziness, see Kidd (2017), Medina (2013: 33, 39), Roberts and West (2015: 2559, 2570). On sloth see DeYoung (2009: ch. 4). See also O’Connor (2018) on idleness, and King (2014: 3786) on indifference. In Battaly (2015), I call people with apathy ‘slackers.’ See King (2014: 3788). On complacency and resignation, see Kawall (2006). Resignation might be common among students who have fixed mindsets. On fixed and growth mindsets, see Dweck et al. (2014). Complacency does not entail procrastination. The complacent person over-estimates her strengths and under-estimates her limitations and thus falsely believes that she

Quitting, procrastinating, and slacking off 187 should not act. Whereas procrastinators believe that they should act. Surprisingly, nor does complacency entail slacking off. Complacent agents are overconfident about their abilities, self-satisfied with their performance, and believe they have no need to act further. They think they are doing fine and don’t need to improve. Accordingly, they won’t realize that they are, e.g., managing their time badly or failing to put in appropriate effort. Unlike slackers, who intentionally waste time and phone it in, complacent agents won’t intentionally do these things. 33 Thanks to Ian James Kidd, Jason Kawall, Josh Dolin, and Paul Bloomfield for extremely helpful comments. Thanks also to Don Baxter, Mona Kulkarni Caron, Andrew Cortens, Charlie Crerar, Kate Elgin, Sam Elgin, Ed Ferrier, Jane Gordon, Seisuke Hayakawa, Chris Innes, Masashi Kasaki, Brian Kierland, Yuhan Liang, Tracy Llanera, Koichiro Misawa, Clifford Roth, Kana Sato, Kunimasa Sato, Lynne Tirrell, and audiences at Keiai University, Boise State University, the Pacific APA, and the University of Connecticut.

References Andreou, Chrisoula. 2007. “Understanding Procrastination.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 37(2): 183–193. Aristotle. 1984. Nicomachean Ethics. In J. Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1729–1867 Arpaly, Nomy. 2003. Unprincipled Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Astell, Mary. 1697. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/54984/54984-h/54984-h.htm Accessed June 2, 2020. Baehr, Jason. 2011. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baehr, Jason. 2020. “The Structure of Intellectual Vices.” In I. J. Kidd, H. Battaly, and Q. Cassam (eds.), Vice Epistemology. London: Routledge. Baker, Jennifer A. 2010. “Procrastination as Vice.” In C. Andreou and M. S. White (eds.), The Thief of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 165–181. Battaly, Heather. 2014. “Varieties of Epistemic Vice.” In J. Matheson and R. Vitz (eds.), The Ethics of Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 51–76. Battaly, Heather. 2015. Virtue. Cambridge: Polity Press. Battaly, Heather. 2017. “Intellectual Perseverance.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 14(6): 669–697. Bennett, Jonathan. 1974. “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.” Philosophy 49: 123–134. Crerar, Charlie. 2018. “Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96(4): 753–766. DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. 2009. Glittering Vices. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Dolin, Josh and Jason Baehr. Manuscript. “Intellectual Patience and Perseverance.” Dweck, C., G. M. Walton, and G. L. Cohen. 2014. “Academic Tenacity: Mindsets and Skills that Promote Long-Term Learning.” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http:// k12education.gatesfoundation.org/resource/academic-tenacity-mindsets-and-skills-tha t-promote-long-term-learning/ Accessed June 2, 2020. Gorney, D. 2010. “Michael Chabon: How to Salvage a Wrecked Novel.” The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/12/michael-chabon-how-to-s alvage-a-wrecked-novel/68665/ Accessed June 2, 2020. Greco, John. 2010. Achieving Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kawall, Jason. 2006. “On Complacency.” American Philosophical Quarterly 43(4): 343–355.

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Kawall, Jason. Forthcoming. “Patience and Sustainability.” In J. Kawall (ed.), The Virtues of Sustainability. Oxford University Press. Kidd, Ian James. 2017. “Capital Epistemic Vices.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6(8): 11–16. Kidd, Ian James. 2020. “Epistemic Corruption and Social Oppression.” In I. J. Kidd, H. Battaly, and Q. Cassam (eds.), Vice Epistemology. London: Routledge. Kim, Kyung Ryung and Eun Hee Seo. 2015. “The Relationship Between Procrastination and Academic Performance: A Meta-Analysis.” Personality and Individual Differences 82: 26–33. King, Nathan. 2019. “Intellectual Perseverance.” In H. Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. New York: Routledge, 256–269. King, Nathan L. 2014. “Erratum to: Perseverance as an Intellectual Virtue.” Synthese 191: 3779–3801. Locke, John. 1996/1706. Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.. MacIntosh, Duncan. 2010. “Intransitive Preferences, Vagueness, and the Structure of Procrastination.” In C. Andreou and M. S. White (eds.), The Thief of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 68–86. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montmarquet, James A. 1993. Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. O’Connor, Brian. 2018. Idleness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perry, John. 2012. The Art of Procrastination. New York: Workman Publishing. Roberts, Robert C. and Ryan West. 2015. “Natural Epistemic Defects and Corrective Virtues.” Synthese 192: 2557–2576. Sosa, Ernest. 2007. A Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stroud, Sarah. 2010. “Is Procrastination Weakness of Will?” In C. Andreou and M. S. White (eds.), The Thief of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 51–67. Swanton, Christine. 2003. Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tanesini, Alessandra. 2018. “Epistemic Vice and Motivation.” Metaphilosophy 49(3): 350–367. Tappolet, Christine. 2010. “Procrastination and Personal Identity.” In C. Andreou and M. S. White (eds.), The Thief of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 115–129. Tenenbaum, Sergio. 2010. “The Vice of Procrastination.” In C. Andreou and M. S. White (eds.), The Thief of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 130–150. Watson, Gary. 1984. “Virtues in Excess.” Philosophical Studies 46(1): 57–74. Zagzebski, Linda. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Essay on the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 Epistemic insensitivity An insidious and consequential vice Maura Priest

10.1 Introduction Imagine a carefully designed symposium session at an American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting. The session consists of three speakers – two wellestablished experts and an up-and-coming youngster. All talks touch on novel issues, and the commentators were given papers well in advance, allowing time to write careful and insightful commentary. Unlike most symposia, audience members were also given papers in advance. Hence, not only are the speakers well-versed in the subject, but so are the questioners. From this description, it might seem like things are not only in epistemic order, but that the epistemic environment is of especially high quality. Hence, the odds of meaningful epistemic exchange might seem higher than the average philosophy talk. However, filling in a few more details, details that might seem prima facie “non-epistemic”, can turn things around completely. At least, that is the gist of what this paper argues. Consider these details: 1 The meeting is scheduled from 11am to 2pm. 2 Like many symposium sessions, the first 2.5 hours are without audience questions. 3 At least half of the scholars in the room are unaware of the cognitive science that the other half understands in-depth. 4 Two of the three speakers are very impatient persons. Perhaps, the above list shows some potential for epistemic trouble. Still it might be surprising to argue that the problematic effects of the above factors can overcome all the epistemic virtues laid out before. This paper will suggest that the tendency to overlook contingent factors that influence “epistemic uptake” is not only a vice, but an especially consequential vice. I call this vice epistemic insensitivity.1 When I say effects are consequential, I mean that there are significant and negative epistemic effects. If effects are “epistemic”, they influence the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, understanding, and other epistemic goods. Negative epistemic effects influence the aforementioned in negative ways, i.e., make the dissemination of knowledge, and so on, less likely.

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Before delving into the specifics of epistemic insensitivity, Section 10.2 makes a case for understanding virtue and vice themselves in a new light. More specifically, Section 10.2 argues that the harms of epistemic insensitivity are of a different kind than other traditional epistemic vices. Section 10.3 starts by exploring epistemic insensitivity in general terms. This broad-brush discussion sets the stage for the next discussion, i.e., exploring the common ways in which epistemic insensitivity manifests. While there are probably thousands of possible displays of epistemic insensitivity, I narrow in on four especially common categories: value insensitivity, expertise insensitivity, physiological insensitivity, and interest insensitivity. Section 10.4 explains that possessing the vice of epistemic insensitivity does not require the exemplifying of insensitivity in any particular category, and certainly not the exemplifying of them all, but rather exemplifying any particular manifestation of the vice consistently enough that it can be understood as a character trait. Section 10.5 explores the opposing vice and middle virtue that are on the same spectrum as epistemic insensitivity, i.e., the virtue of sensitivity and the vice of oversensitivity. Section 10.6 covers potential objections.

10.2 Two types of virtue Virtue is a type of excellence. But there are many excellences. One debate in the virtue epistemology literature has been between the two types of excellences described as “reliabilism” and “responsibilism”.2 These virtues differ, for instance, insofar as the former are closer to a skill and the latter closer to a character trait. But one factor they have in common is that both consider traits virtuous insofar as they aid an agent in acquiring true beliefs, wisdom, knowledge, etc. In other words, they help the virtue-holder acquire valuable epistemic goods. Such virtues are admirable and latch onto critical facets of our epistemic lives. One criticism, however, is this is a rather narrow vision for all epistemic virtue. Let us think about athletes and athletic excellence. Athletes show virtue in their craft (i.e., the craft of athletics) insofar as they are successful at setting records, scoring points, winning games, and otherwise demonstrating their own ability to excel athletically – in other words, insofar as they, personally, demonstrate superior athletic skill. This makes an athlete great. Perhaps some athletes also show related talents, for example, maybe they are at especially good at bringing out great athletic performance in children learning the craft. We might consider this a good thing, but it says little about the athlete’s own excellence. In judging great athleticism, we must know about the accomplishments of the athlete themselves. Consider a different field of expertise. Let us look at physicians who are experts in their matter of expertise, i.e., in health. Unlike with athletes, the physician’s excellence is not explained in how well he or she personally demonstrates superior health. Indeed, we can imagine a physician who is not only unhealthy, but one who gets progressively unhealthier every year. This is compatible with the same physician demonstrating excellence in his field, indeed progressive excellence where each prior success builds on the last. This is because a physician’s excellence is demonstrated not in improving their own health, but in improving

Epistemic insensitivity 191 the health of others. Physicians manifest excellence insofar as their skills allow them to cure others, or maintain their health, or suggest lifestyle changes that better the patient’s well-being. While some might praise a physician for personally being in excellent health, perhaps this way the physician “sets a good example”, this would nonetheless be tangential to the sense of excellence traditionally attributed to physicians. I contend that epistemology should care about both senses of excellence just mentioned. However, for most of its history it seems to have been excessively focused on the athletic sense of excellence at the expense of the physician sense. Epistemic virtues (both reliabilism and responsibilism) are typically traits that aid the virtue-holder’s own acquisition of knowledge, and vices are those that inhibit such. There has been some talk of physician-like virtues, but they are few and far between.3 It also seems there has not been a clear enough distinction made between these two kinds. With the above distinction in mind, let me make the case for why physicianlike virtues matter. It is a simple case that comes with just a few premises. To begin: epistemology is a subject concerned with knowledge and understanding, and thereby the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, i.e., with inquiry. Sometimes knowledge and understanding are acquired by an agent in complete independence. Imagine Descartes, for example, sitting alone in his pajamas, in deep thought about geometric equations. Descartes might acquire some theoretical knowledge in this fashion. Or imagine Darwin, alone in the wilderness, who stumbles across a porcupine and quietly observes. In so doing Darwin acquires knowledge about porcupine behavior. But these cases are not only not exhaustive of the way we acquire knowledge, they are also not typical. In many if not most instances, what we know is influenced by our social surroundings, i.e., surroundings impacted by other epistemic agents. Testimony is an obvious case, but other people issue influence in other ways. Friends might serve as a study partner, or encourage us to join a book club, or entice us into considering a particular ideological viewpoint (even one which they personally reject). The point is: social interaction frequently influences knowledge acquisition. Hence, if we are to care about inquiry and how people acquire various sorts of epistemic goods, then we ought to care about how some epistemic agents affect the epistemic lives of other epistemic agents. We should care not only that individual epistemic agents have habits that help themselves personally, but also that epistemic agents are successful in aiding others to acquire the same. The second is every bit as important as the first, for as social creatures a meaningful proportion of all our beliefs were acquired with the help of other agents. In other words, these beliefs were acquired interpersonally. Hence, I call the physician-like epistemic virtues, interpersonal, while the athlete-like ones I call personal virtues. Interpersonal virtues can be thought of as a type of “other-regarding” virtue, i.e., these types of virtues, when exercised, have the tendency to aid knowledge acquisition in persons other than the virtue holder. Responsibilist epistemologists have typically understood epistemic virtues in an Aristotelian sense, i.e., as lying on a spectrum of extremes. The middle state is

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virtue, while each opposing is a vice. Hence if there can be interpersonal virtues, there can also be interpersonal vices. I am understanding an interpersonal epistemic vice as a character trait that negatively influences the epistemic endeavors of others. This negative impact is manifest by making it less likely that other epistemic agents will acquire knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and other epistemic goods. What I call epistemic insensitivity is primarily a vice of this kind, i.e., an interpersonal vice. While at times insensitivity negatively impacts one’s own epistemic life, the most telling consequences are ones that impact not the agent himself, but others. In the next section, some of the most common forms of insensitivity are discussed. We will see that the harmful epistemic impact stretches widely, perhaps more widely than many would have expected.

10.3 Four breeds of insensitivity 10.3.1 Expertise insensitivity Imagine a conversation between “Fred”, a professor of climate science, and “John”, his next-door neighbor. Suppose that John has a bachelor’s degree in communication from the local state university (he graduated 20 years ago). John now has a middle-class job in human resources. He is not sure what to make of climate change. He expresses this to Fred, noting that he heard in the 1970s that there were concerns about the ice age that never panned out.4 John also notes that he knows the earth is billions of years old. Since records of climate were not kept that long ago, he does not see how anyone can know that today’s climate is a pattern that is really different from the past. His neighbor Fred begins with a genuine desire to educate his neighbor, and hopefully turn him away from doubt into belief. The problem, however, is Fred uses a number of scientific concepts that John does not understand.5 The concepts are second nature to him, and seem obvious. But they are not obvious to his neighbor. Hence very early in the conversation John starts to get confused, and with confusion he brings up objections. Fred is annoyed and points out that earlier comments already explain those objections away. At this point, it should be obvious to Fred that his conversation partner is lost. But to whatever extent Fred might be aware of such, he does not take the opportunity to correct his earlier mistake, i.e., he does not go back and explain the concepts in simpler terms. Instead, he moves on to other concepts that are equally confusing. Fred first shows insensitivity by not assessing John’s background knowledge. When experts know that they have more background knowledge than their interlocutor, the sensitive response (before getting into deep conversation) is to make sure they are starting on the same page. It is only by knowing where the other starts from that an expert can effectively teach the non-expert. But skipping this initial assessment seems a common mistake. Besides, whether common or not, it is a mistake that there are epistemic reasons to avoid. If this assessment is skipped, the odds of importing knowledge drop precipitously. The second place where Fred shows insensitivity is in missing that John got lost mid-conversation. And Fred ought to have realized this; the line of questioning

Epistemic insensitivity 193 revealed as much. A properly sensitive agent would immediately perceive questions as key pieces of epistemic information along the lines of: “The knowledge I want to convey is getting lost in translation. I need to stop, back-up, and make sure that these translation mishaps are corrected”. As the conversation goes on, there might be further cues that John has missed a point or gotten confused. Sensitive and insensitive agents will have opposite reactions. The former will take these cues as a reason to pause, rephrase, and reassess. In other words, they take action to make sure that their testimony is not merely heard but understood. The insensitive agent is oblivious to these cues. As such the insensitive agent will carry on as if his conversation partner were latching on to every word. An opportunity to disseminate knowledge is wasted. This is expertise insensitivity. Expertise insensitivity is obviously a detrimental vice of a teacher. Educators unaware of lost students not only fail to teach in that instant, but this vice has consequences for the next semester as slides, assignments, and class activities remain unchanged. It is also unfortunate to be an audience member of an academic talk featuring an insensitive speaker. It is quite common, after all, for academic talks to be attended by non-specialists. The epistemically sensitive will speak to reach all, while the insensitive speaks to a room full of glazed-over eyeballs. And it is not only in traditional education settings that problems arise. As the example with John and Fred shows, everyday conversations can also be plagued by expertise insensitivity. If an agent manifests this type of vice regularly and frequently, i.e., if an agent has the vice of epistemic insensitivity, the potential for lost knowledge can be substantial. What about the non-expert? Can they show epistemic insensitivity, or more particularly, something called “expertise insensitivity”? Yes, on both accounts. Let me first make clear that in any two-way conversation (i.e., most conversations, maybe all depending on how you define conversation) it is ideal that both parties are epistemically sensitive, and detrimental when either party is epistemically insensitive. However, epistemic insensitivity is perhaps most problematic when exhibited by an expert talking to a non-expert (because of the critical missed opportunity for teaching and knowledge transfer.) Even so, epistemic insensitivity is always an epistemic negative in any conversational setting. And expertise insensitivity can stretch beyond the insensitivity of the expert. Expertise insensitivity is simply being insensitive to the epistemically important role that expertise plays in a conversation. The non-expert can show epistemic insensitivity to an expert, with unfavorable epistemic results (and regardless of the results, it is disrespectful.) If, for instance, I (someone without a medical degree) am talking to a physician, I might show expertise insensitivity by talking about the pharmacology class I took as an undergraduate and why that class justifies rejecting the medication that my physician recommends. This shows insensitivity to the fact that my physician might be insulted by my presumption that my own “expertise” matters more than his, in spite of his superior qualifications. An epistemically sensitive agent could share the same information with the physician, but in a more modest tone that would respect the physician’s intellectual authority, for example, “I’m curious what you would say about something I remembered from an undergraduate class…”

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Insensitivity can be due to either ignorance or lack of concern. You can notice that interlocutors are getting lost while just not giving a damn, or you might be oblivious to them getting lost in the first place. Both are insensitive. What is common to both is the lack of response to epistemic feedback. I will not argue for this in depth, but I think it is a common feature of virtues and vices generally that they can manifest via distinct components. In this regard, epistemic insensitivity can be thought to have the following components: 1 Failing to recognize other agents’ epistemic concerns (which can be owing to either ignorance or lack of concern). 2 The failure to respond to, or properly take into account, the epistemic concerns of other agents. (If you are ignorant, you almost meet this by default. However, agents can be aware of concerns but do nothing about them.) When such virtues and vices have component manifestations, possession of the virtue or vice does not depend on the agent manifesting all parts. Epistemically insensitive agents can have both component features, but they might only have one. Agents that possess component 1 will typically, almost by default, also have 2, i.e., those unaware of an agent’s concerns will either not respond to them, or only respond incidentally.

10.3.2 Value insensitivity When considering the best way to spread information, it is helpful to remember epistemic agents are not purely rational robots. As such, the following types of considerations which we would not need to worry about with robots, we will need to worry about with persons: 1 Whether persons believe their own viewpoint is being given a fair shake. 2 Whether persons believe their deepest held values are being attacked. 3 Whether the testimony persons hear fits with their cultural upbringing. Epistemically insensitive agents tend to ignore the importance of 1–3. Or said more exactly, one way of manifesting epistemic insensitivity is to ignore 1–3. Moreover, those who behave in such careless ways are also prone to blame the victim, i.e., to claim that if the relevant conversation partner or audience member learned nothing from the epistemic exchange, the blame for ignorance must fall on the ignorant. Consider the falling conversation: Sandy: I’m a big fan of presidential candidate Smith. Jim: How could you say that? Someone with such outlandish views on animal rights can never get elected. Sandy: I agree with him on animal rights. Jim: But don’t you get it, most people don’t because your views are extreme. If we want our party to win in November we can’t vote for Smith.

Epistemic insensitivity 195 Sandy: My views aren’t extreme and I’m going to vote for him regardless. Jim: It is because of people like you that we lose the election. You are putting your emotions ahead of rationality. There are many things we might say about the above conversation. But one of the first, it seems, is that the following two statements might both be true: (1) Jim is correct that candidate Smith has no chance of winning in that district, but also (2) Jim is epistemically culpable for behaving insensitively. If Jim had refrained from attacking Sandy’s values, Sandy would have been more inclined to consider Jim’s point seriously and perhaps think twice about whether candidate Smith is the best strategic choice. But the insensitivity put Sandy on the defensive, and she was no longer in a position to calmly reflect on Jim’s claims. (Although Jim’s claims are about strategy, they are still epistemically loaded as they are also truths in the empirical world.) Jim might have been correct that Sandy was putting her emotions ahead of rationality. But he doesn’t consider that this is partly his fault, and that even if Sandy is failing epistemically, he might be failing epistemically as well. Different types of value questioning can overlap: one person’s deeply held personal values might conflict with another’s cultural upbringing. Consider someone who was raised hunting and eating meat, call her “Jenny”. Perhaps Jenny is not deeply committed to eating meat, but this is just what she is familiar with and considers typical. An insensitive person might start a conversation with Jenny by condemning all meat eaters as grossly immoral. Jenny presumably does not consider herself or her family grossly immoral. When the conversation turns in that direction, the plusses and minuses of vegetarianism are put to the sidelines. Jenny is likely to become focused solely on the defensive. An epistemically sensitive person would refrain from this type of characterization in order to focus on the ethical arguments about meat eating, the pain animals suffer, and so on. The sensitive interlocutor is going to have higher odds of widening Jenny’s understanding about animal ethics. Epistemic failures need not be directly tied to bad personal epistemic habits. They can be tied to bad interpersonal habits. And bad interpersonal habits include unawareness of the way presentation styles affect epistemic uptake. Epistemically sensitive agents are known to do right even when their conversation partner does wrong. At this point, one might wonder whether epistemic insensitivity requires the help of other virtues like civility and respect for others. Or perhaps, whether by showing epistemic sensitivity, (especially value sensitivity) you thereby also manifest civility and respect. In this sense, I see a disanalogy between the virtue of epistemic sensitivity and the vice of epistemic insensitivity. Epistemic insensitivity is a form of disrespect. It is a failure to give another epistemic agent the attention and concern they deserve in virtue of their membership in a community of rational equals. “Rational equals” does not imply that everyone is “equally rational”, nor that we are all equally skilled epistemically. There is nothing insensitive in recognizing expertise and epistemic differences. “Rational equals” suggests that adult

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humans (barring some particular cognitive disabilities) are rational creatures, and this rationality explains our equal political and moral standing. The right to be an intellectually active community member should not depend on being an expert, but only passing the bar of rationality. When an epistemically insensitive agent fails to acknowledge another’s intellectual input, they disrespect the other’s status as a member of the rational community. Epistemic sensitivity, to some extent, does manifest intellectual respect. But there are so many ways to be disrespectful that epistemic insensitivity is not a foolproof shield. After all, an agent might carefully listen to another, but shortly thereafter question their motives aggressively. This agent failed to properly respect their interlocutor, despite first showing epistemic sensitivity. This, I suspect would also be a form of uncivil behavior. Hence, epistemic sensitivity (the virtue), while itself likely enhances civility, other things being equal, need not entail civility. What about persons who have entire systems of false belief? Consider someone who believes the first moon landing was staged. This false belief is likely accompanied by many other false beliefs, such as a government conspiracy which explains why there was incentive to falsify the landing.6 Or consider someone who believes vaccines cause autism. This can be accompanied by other questionable beliefs, such as the belief that almost all physicians and medical researchers are nothing but pawns of “big pharma”. As false as these beliefs are, there are sometimes good reasons to “hear the other side out”. This is because people who do not believe they are being heard are unlikely to hear you. Hence, in private conversation with a conspiracist theorist, one can do epistemic good by hearing out false ideas.7 Now some might object as follows. First, “those taken in by conspiracy have little chance of changing their mind”. At times this might be true, and it is up to each epistemic agent to consider whether the person with whom you engage is worth the conversation. But still, there are those who once believed conspiracy theories who then changed their minds. Change is possible. Even if you are not the mind-changer in a single conversation, you might start the process of reconsidering ideas. But you are unlikely to do this by dismissing the conspiracy theorist’s views. Dismissiveness is likely to cause anger and resentment. Moreover, it shows you do not see them as a fellow epistemic agent capable of judging and responding to evidence. If they are capable of judging and responding to evidence, it might do good to hear why they believe as they do. Understanding this might make it easier to respond in effective ways. I once had a conversation with someone convinced that socialism would quickly lead to a civil war. I listened to their reasons, and it soon became clear that they had a completely inaccurate perception of what socialism actually consisted in. Once they understood, I could immediately see them reconsider their views. A second objection is that: “even considering outlandish views gives false credence to nonsense, thus leading more people to take them seriously”. This might be true in some circumstances where the audience is vast and impersonal, i.e., on radio, in newspapers, on television, and other forms of mass media. Often it

Epistemic insensitivity 197 is best to not give conspiracy theories serious consideration, for doing this leads others to think the ideas are themselves serious. But there are more caveats to this objection than I usually hear others admit. First, the following two epistemic stances are possible: (1) not discussing outlandish ideas in a serious way, while (2) not being dismissive of those who hold these ideas. If the ideas are really outlandish, and therefore not taken seriously, there is no need to mention them at all. If they are outlandish but a large portion of the populace does take them seriously, then it may be worth giving the view some air time to get that large swath of the population to engage in conversation. There is not always an easy answer, but dismissiveness is rarely justified epistemically. Lastly and most importantly, everyday conversations are not always aired on mass media. When talking to a single person or small group, there is little reason to worry that considering their ideas will lead to any type of society-wide influence. The claim is not that there is never cause, or never epistemic cause, to question values. Rather the claim is that the epistemically sensitive person is aware of the costs of doing so, and the insensitive person is not. Moreover, the epistemically sensitive person considers the costs of questioning commitments, while the insensitive person does not. All of this is compatible with questioning the aptness of commitments in certain circumstances. 10.3.3 Interest insensitivity Consider a situation similar to our opening example. Imagine a philosophy book session, with three speakers and three commentators. The book topic is philosophy of medicine. The audience and commentators consist of both medical professionals and philosophers. Suppose, also, that the format session involves nearly three hours of speaking before any engagement from the audience. Further suppose that the philosophers speak using highly technical philosophical language. Likewise, the medical professionals use highly technical medical language. The session goes on. In the described situation, various physiological and interest insensitivities are at play. Let us start with interest insensitivity. This is the type of insensitivity that fails to notice that interest in the relevant epistemic topic is waning. It is uncontroversial that epistemic uptake improves with interest in a subject, and there is plenty of scientific literature to back this up.8 Being bored comes with an epistemic cost. Epistemic sharing with someone who isn’t listening is not sharing at all. Hence, the first problem with the philosophical book session is its length in the absence of breaks or discussions. Even when persons are interested in a subject, three hours of listening to complex material will strain the focus of most. Even more, a room is never full of “the most attentive”. Some are more attentive than others, and in any large audience there will be some members who have particular trouble with attention span, and others who are in-between. Hence, neglecting to consider the length of speaking times is neglecting to consider an important epistemic consideration, i.e., the epistemic purview of all audience members. It is not only epistemically misguided, it is straightforwardly exclusive.

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10.3.4 Physiological insensitivity Like interest insensitivity, physiological insensitivity impedes epistemic concentration and thereby the acquisition of epistemic goods. However, physiological insensitivity is completely divorced from epistemic and intellectual issues under discussion. It is possible that a talk is well-prepared, gripping, easy to understand, and yet audience members take in little information. Physiological insensitivity might explain the problem. Imagine, for instance, that an expected conference breakfast never arrived. Moreover, the last talk before lunch is scheduled to conclude at 1:00pm. Most in the room are very hungry, and most are aware that most others are very hungry. Nonetheless, suppose the speaker continues to talk past the allotted time, ignoring cues from the chair. The speaker, by showing insensitivity to the audience members’ physical needs, is thereby guilty of epistemic insensitivity. And this epistemic insensitivity has consequences: hungry scholars focusing on their upcoming lunch are distracted, not playing their “A” game, and so on. There are, of course, other examples. An especially hot or cold room makes learning more difficult and uncomfortable, as do bright lights, loud noises, and a microphone that is not well-programmed. All of these things might seem minor, and hardly vicious. But I would argue otherwise. While in any given instance the consequences are rarely extreme, a general intellectual culture of ignoring physiological needs adds up: bits of knowledge sharing lost here and there can be substantial over time.

10.4 On different manifestations At first it might seem odd to categorize different manifestations of a single vice. If they manifest in these different ways, one might wonder, are they really the same vice at all? Upon reflection, however, it seems we can say something similar about all vices, i.e., that there are some common ways the vice might manifest, even though these common ways are not exhaustive. For instance, consider greed. One common display is refusing to donate money to charitable causes. Another is never giving even a little of your time to those who need it. A third common form of greed is an obsession with accumulating wealth. Agents can be greedy and manifest only one of these displays of greediness, or they can manifest them all. What matters is that however greed might be manifested, the greedy person maintains a disposition to show greed itself, no matter what form. Likewise, someone can be epistemically insensitive by only manifesting one of the aforementioned types of insensitivity, or by manifesting them all. What matters for possessing the vice is that there is a consistent disposition to manifest insensitivity, in whatever form. But if all of the types of insensitivity mentioned are manifestations of the same vice, what is the use in distinguishing between them? Well, if we know the common forms of insensitivity, then it seems more likely we will recognize insensitivity when we see it. One problem with certain types of vices like insensitivity is that they are under-discussed and under-recognized. We might just shrug our

Epistemic insensitivity 199 shoulders at insensitivity when we ought to criticize it. By describing particular instances of insensitivity, we make it easier to call out these vices (in ourselves and others) and thereby correct for them. In addition, by using different examples of insensitivity we can see what all types have in common. If we were to only focus on one kind of insensitivity, we might mistake non-essential features as part of insensitivity itself. But when we see common features across different types of attitudes and behaviors, we can identify those features as essential to the vice itself. With insensitivity, we see the way that a refusal to take account of contingent epistemic features can have negative epistemic consequences and be disrespectful. Even without the bad consequences, epistemic insensitivity does wrong to other epistemic agents in not giving them the respect they deserve as fellow members of the epistemic community. Speaking of recognizing vice across cases, some might argue that what I am calling epistemic insensitivity is just the manifestation of other vices. Perhaps poor listening skills are just incivility, arrogance, or being uncharitable. I will first say that this criticism can be launched at almost any vice or virtue. Maybe we do not need a vice called “selfishness”, when we already have, say, greed and arrogance. However, what objections like this are missing is that vices can be distinguished from one another insofar as their components relate to each other in unique ways, insofar as the components are more or less central to the vice, and insofar as the components of the vice might or might not require a certain degree of intensity. The components of the vice are only part of the vice: how they fit together is of equal conceptual importance. Many would say that selfishness and greed are distinct vices. However, there is significant overlap, i.e., component features that contribute to the possession of the vice of selfishness are sometimes the same component features of greed. What makes the vices distinct is the specific role played by each component feature. For instance, “putting self above others” might be a component feature of both greed and selfishness. Yet this component is more central to selfishness. Likewise, “obsession with wealth accumulation” is more central to greed. Likewise, the vice of passive aggressiveness arguably shares component features with the vices of manipulativeness, dishonesty, and cowardice. Despite overlaps of component features of many virtues and vices, distinguishing traits seems worthwhile. Using the description “he is passive-aggressive” has a communitive power that effectively portrays a certain descriptive content. Maybe you could offer the same descriptive content by saying, “he is manipulative in a way that shows both dishonesty and cowardness”. Sometimes these alternative descriptions work well. But often they fail to capture the same content. Even when vices are conceptually close, differentiating them helps us communicate. The above said, I will briefly layout key differences between epistemic insensitivity and other vices. Let me start with incivility. Incivility seems both broader and narrower than epistemic insensitivity. It is broader because there are ways to manifest incivility that do not bear any relation to epistemic insensitivity. Responding to another agent rudely and aggressively is usually uncivil. But rudeness and aggressiveness bear less relation to insensitivity. Suppose that I know

200 Maura Priest my friend Alex is unusually competitive. Alex wants to be engaged in a task with a goal, not passively contemplating. Knowing this, I engage in an aggressive conversation that awakens Alex’s competitive side. In caring about bringing out the intellectual best in Alex I manifest sensitivity. In this way, incivility requires more than epistemic insensitivity. I know many whose intellectual style is always civil. They are always polite, they always pause to listen to the response of their interlocutors, they never make rash accusations about motives, etc. Yet they are still epistemically insensitive. While they listen to their interlocutors, they also treat them all the same. When attending conferences, they have the same style of engagement, disregarding the differences in the communities and cultures. This is civil but not sensitive. In this way, epistemic sensitivity is more demanding than civility. I hope it is becoming clear how virtues and vices that might initially seem to have much in common can also be different in critical respects. I will finish with the difference between epistemic arrogance and epistemic insensitivity. While the epistemically arrogant are often epistemically insensitive, they need not be. An epistemically insensitive agent need not be arrogant, for their insensitivity might be explained primarily in terms of ignorance and carelessness. But epistemic arrogance requires a type of mindset that cannot be explained by carelessness or negligence alone. Lastly, imagine a vice called something like “uncharitableness”, consisting in the disposition to interpret others uncharitably. This is a vice, indeed, but not the vice of epistemic insensitivity. The epistemically insensitive do not actively attempt to misrepresent others, they just fail to pay proper attention to contingent features that might sometimes result in unintentional misrepresentation. Misrepresentation is an incidental, not essential, feature of epistemic insensitivity.

10.5 A spectrum of sensitivity Aristotelian vices, like insensitivity, lie on a spectrum. One consequence of this spectrum view of virtue and vice is that there can be borderline cases, i.e., cases in which it is unclear whether someone has the vice or not. To possess epistemic insensitivity requires not merely showing insensitivity on occasion, but that one is disposed to show insensitivity in a wide range of circumstances. This, of course, is consistent with not showing it for years at a time, or potentially ever. Disposition is not action. I am arguing that epistemic insensitivity is an interpersonal vice, hence manifesting this vice requires the presence of other agents. We can theoretically imagine an isolated epistemic agent who is disposed to insensitivity, but never manifests it, for there are simply no interpersonal opportunities. We’ve already mentioned the virtue on insensitivity’s spectrum, namely sensitivity. While the insensitive person is disposed to ignore contingent circumstances that influence the acquisition of epistemic goods, the sensitive person is disposed to the opposite, i.e., to be aware of the contingent circumstances and to respond in a way that mitigates the obstacles to knowledge (or understanding, wisdom, etc.). What then, is the opposite vice? It might seem that it is hard to be “too aware” of

Epistemic insensitivity 201 contingent circumstances. However, there are ways in which agents can indeed be oversensitive to contingent features. Consider, for instance, value sensitivity. An insensitive agent ignores his interlocutor’s values and makes no effort to participate in the discussion in a way that respects these values. The sensitive agent, on the other hand, is acutely aware of the relevant values and manages to steer the conversation so that not only the manifestation of blatant disrespect is avoided, but also (insofar as showing respect might forward epistemic ends), respect is displayed. Oversensitive agents take sensitivity to an unproductive extreme. They are so concerned with contingent factors that they fail to focus on the epistemic. Imagine, for instance, someone who is so concerned with not offending that they dance around topics or hide the truth. Suppose Tina suspects that Jane was upset because three months ago, her car was broken into. Tina and Jane are talking local politics. Tina, however, refuses to bring up anything even remotely related to crime out of fear of hurting Jane. Not only does this fear prevent productive discussion, but it is also overwrought insofar as Jane would be fine talking about these things. In this sense oversensitivity is patronizing: oversensitive agents assume their interlocutor is incapable of handling a wide variety of honest epistemic inquiry. Suppose a professor cancels his class because the university football team lost a game. This professor is not giving his students enough credit for their ability to focus in non-ideal situations. Another way of showing oversensitivity is to agree with everything someone says out of fear of hurting or offending. Suppose, for instance, that Betty is a devout Catholic and her friend Jim is an atheist. When Betty talks about her faith, Jim often pretends to agree so as to avoid offending Betty’s sensitivities. But this lacks due respect to Betty as an epistemic agent. Jim not only withholds truths from Betty, but he also refuses to engage in genuine intellectual discussion. Presumably, if Jim did trust Betty as an epistemic agent, then such engagement wouldn’t be a problem. The key to hitting the middle ground between insensitivity and oversensitivity is to simultaneously respect one’s intellectual partners as autonomous capable thinkers while also realizing they are autonomous, capable, human thinkers who have their frailties. The insensitive agent forgets about the human part. The oversensitive agent forgets about the autonomous thinker part. The sensitive agent gets things just right, while also being cognizant of differences between persons.

10.6 Objections Some might object to my description of epistemic insensitivity as a vice. I imagine one objection might be this: by insisting that epistemic insensitivity is a vice, I encourage indulgent epistemic behaviors, i.e., listening to people who shouldn’t be listened to. After all, these persons are unreasonable and there is no hope of changing their minds. Likewise, discouraging what I call insensitivity encourages people to listen to those who aren’t only wrong, but perhaps purposely spreading false information. Not everyone, the critic might contend, is worthy of epistemic respect.

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Let me repeat what epistemic sensitivity is not: epistemic sensitivity does not mean listening to persons in all circumstances, no matter what. It does not demand engaging with trolls or anyone else out to cause epistemic (or just ordinary) trouble. There is a wide range of situations in which an epistemically virtuous person would choose not to have a conversation. One reason might simply be that he is too busy with other tasks. The virtuous person knows his time is limited, and uses it in morally virtuous ways. Likewise, the epistemically virtuous person knows his epistemic time is limited and does not waste it on fruitless endeavors. Engaging trolls is not epistemically sensitive, but oversensitive. Oversensitivity can be manifest by going too far in trying to listen to someone who clearly has subversion as his intellectual goal. The insensitive person, on the other hand, dismisses intellectual engagement for weak or non-compelling reasons. The sensitive person knows when to engage. The key point is that the epistemically sensitive person need not listen to every person in every circumstance. What matters is that when the epistemically sensitive person does choose to engage he does so in a way that is free of the vices of insensitivity and oversensitivity. Thus: if there is going to be conversation at all, it should be done with sensitivity. If there is no point in trying to be sensitive, then there is probably no point in trying to have the conversation in the first place. Epistemic resources would be better spent on other things. Notwithstanding the just mentioned clarifications, some might argue there are still cases in which it makes sense to engage with a speaker in straightforwardly insensitive ways. Perhaps someone has views that are so harmful, it is to the benefit of others that those views are dismissed out of hand, and even dismissed arrogantly. My first response is to point out that we must distinguish between epistemic and moral benefit. The type of insensitivity that concerns me is epistemic sensitivity. Hence, it is possible that epistemic goals and moral goals conflict, and that there may be cases in which there is some moral benefit in acting with epistemic insensitivity. It does not follow, however, that there would be epistemic benefit. The critic might say: but sometimes there is epistemic benefit to acting in ways that are generically insensitive. My response: yes, perhaps. It is compatible with my thesis to admit to unique cases in which epistemically insensitive behavior leads to epistemically beneficial results. Because we are talking about an epistemic vice and not an epistemic rule, this possibility does not conflict with my claims. Consider an analogy. Perhaps being cowardly sometimes results in moral good. It does not follow that being cowardly is virtuous, much less that moral persons are cowardly. Likewise, even if there are rare circumstances in which it makes epistemic sense to be insensitive, it does not follow that insensitivity is an epistemic virtue. The general disposition toward epistemic insensitivity makes one a worse epistemic agent overall. It also happens to be a vice that tends to have especially harmful epistemic consequences. This is compatible with there being positive consequences in special circumstances. A different objection might contend that this vice I describe is not “essentially” epistemic. The thought might be that if a character trait is not directly related to

Epistemic insensitivity 203 the acquisition of knowledge then it is not “really” epistemic. Along similar lines, one might take issue with an epistemic virtue primarily affecting other epistemic agents. Let me address each issue in turn. First, I am unconcerned about what is “essentially” epistemic. It is unclear to me what that means. I am concerned with what is generally epistemic. The tendency to question virtues and vices that do not directly relate to knowledge acquisition has a long history. For decades epistemology was nearly exclusively focused on justification, knowledge, and belief. This narrow focus was at the expense of other epistemic goods and activities. Yet if knowledge is epistemic, it only makes sense that so too are the activities which lead to knowledge acquisition. In other words, inquiry is epistemic. Moreover, joint inquiry is no less epistemic simply because it involves multiple agents. If knowledge is epistemic, so is inquiry, and so then is joint inquiry. This paper is focused on joint inquiry and how it can be done well or badly, or in ways likely to promote epistemic ends or likely to inhibit them. As far as my focus on agents other than the virtue holder, return to my earlier division of physician and athlete virtue. Some want to deny that there is anything equivalent to physician-like virtues in epistemology. But again, let us go back to the beginning, i.e., what is epistemology? At minimum, epistemology is not only about knowledge but also justification and belief. If justification and belief are part of epistemology, it seems epistemology is not only about knowledge but related concepts. Inquiry seems a related concept, and it is hard to deny that inquiry is often done with others. Even more, it is at least plausible that other agents have as great an influence on our own knowledge acquisition as we do ourselves. If this is true, then it seems those who care about epistemology should care about habits which increase the odds that person-to-person interactions will result in favorable epistemic outcomes. And caring about this is just caring about a special class of epistemic virtue (interpersonal) and vice, i.e., traits that influence other persons and their pursuit of epistemic goods. In one sense, it is of non-critical importance whether we call epistemic sensitivity and insensitivity “epistemic” or give it some other name. What matters is the phenomenon, what we call it is secondary. Yet in another sense, there is some value in putting these traits in the same class as traditional, individually centered, epistemic traits. Because doing so might encourage epistemologists to focus on these traits, and give them needed attention. This seems especially important since these types of other-directed traits have been overlooked. Lastly, there is no principled reason to prefer athlete-type traits over physician-like traits. Both are of central importance when it comes to the acquisition and dissemination of epistemic goods. If the overall epistemic state of society matters (and not just a few epistemic super stars), then other-directed virtue and vice should be front and center in epistemic discussions. Should we (epistemically) blame those who are epistemically insensitive in a broad sense of “blame”? I would say “yes” in the same way that I would regarding their other epistemic vices. We should blame the vice in the abstract, but not blame the particular persons who possess the vice, even though they are, indeed,

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blameworthy in a broad sense. Individually, this means we hold both the abstract belief that “epistemic insensitivity is bad”, and also the belief that individuals with these traits are blameworthy, i.e., we recognize that having the vice makes them a worse epistemic agent. Blaming in the abstract, on a social level, means that conversations between friends, family, and coworkers recognize and condemn epistemic insensitivity. Consider the following: “I admire the bravery of the victims who came forward”. “The greed of the administration in using that donation for their own salary is outrageous”. “Laughing at Jacob for crying in the office is awful, just heartless. Everyone knows he just lost his brother”. The above are instances of publicly praising virtues and blaming vice. We can imagine further examples where such blame and praise are expressed in public fashion, i.e., through a media source. Such blame and praise shape our social perceptions of what is and is not acceptable. Ideally, epistemic insensitivity should be blamed in this fashion. A caveat is that the direct (face-to-face) expression of blame is usually unhelpful. Persons do not respond well to this type of criticism. Notwithstanding, persons do seem to respond to social approval and disproval, understood abstractly, i.e., we are less inclined to do what is socially unacceptable. Public condemnation plays a role in shaping the socially acceptable. The public condemnation of epistemic insensitivity makes it less socially acceptable. Making it less socially acceptable makes it less common. This is epistemically helpful.

10.7 Conclusion When we enter into epistemic engagement, we might think that what matters most are true beliefs. And indeed, true beliefs are important. If we lack true beliefs, we cannot share them. But this is only part of the story. There is a host of contingent, and not directly epistemic, features of discussion, conversation, and mutual epistemic inquiry that can have great impact on the extent to which knowledge and other epistemic goods are exchanged. These contingent features can be just as impactful as other features more “directly” epistemic. Excellent analytic reasoning ability might directly influence knowledge acquisition. But suppose this excellent reasoner is epistemically insensitive. Someone more sensitive, but less analytically skilled, might improve the epistemic world far more than our insensitive genius. Humans are not epistemic angels; contingent features which ought not impact knowledge acquisition do, in fact, influence it. Hence, if we care about imparting epistemic goods in the real world and not just the ideal world, we should care about epistemic insensitivity. In arguing that epistemic insensitivity is a vice, I have argued that not all epistemic vices affect an agent’s own epistemic state. Or at least, they need not. A different class of vices concerns how an agent’s own epistemic habits influence epistemic goods acquired by others.

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Notes 1 Woomer (2017) writes about “agential insensitivity”. While the language we use is similar, the concepts are very different. In particular, my concern is about how an agent shows insensitivity to other agents, not to evidence. In addition, the consequences of insensitivity, on my account, fall mostly outside of the insensitive agent. 2 A lot has been written on reliabilism vs. responsibilism. Some examples include Greco 2000, 2011; Baehr 2006; Battaly 2008; and Fleisher 2017. 3 Perhaps one of the articles that gets closest to what I’m getting at here and in my 2017 piece (“Intellectual Humility: An Interpersonal Theory”) is Kawall 2002. Anther article along these lines is Driver 2003. Driver says the best way to distinguish between moral and epistemic virtue is in their consequences, i.e., epistemic virtues have positive epistemic consequences. This is similar to my justification for physician-like epistemic virtues, i.e., that we should care about good epistemic consequences overall, and many overall epistemic consequences concern how our personal epistemic behaviors have interpersonal consequences. Other articles which touch on the altruistic side of epistemic virtue include Lackey 2018; Fallis and Whitcomb 2009; Fallis 2004; and Paternotte and Ivanova 2017. 4 While there were some scientists who predicted an ice age for the 1970s, this was far from a consensus view and many other scientists predicted warming. A good summary of the myth and facts can be found in Kessler 2015. 5 Carel and Kidd (2014) discuss a similar problem in regards to the healthcare field. Carel and Kidd argue that medical professionals do their patients an epistemic injustice by using medical terminology which they cannot possibly follow. I would say this is an example of a physician showing insensitivity to his patients and both their epistemic and healthcare needs. 6 Philosophical work on conspiracy theories includes Sunstein 2009; Coady 2003, 2007a, 2007b, and 2019; Graumann and Moscovici 1987; Keeley 1999; Dentith 2014; Raikka 2009; Pigden 2007; Clarke 2007; and Levy 2007. 7 Burroughs and Tollesfsen (2016) argue that children are victims of Miranda Fricker’s type of epistemic injustice. We tend to distrust children without good reason, based merely on the fact they are children. While being a child might give us reason to think someone has less overall knowledge and experience, this isn’t necessarily reason to dismiss them out of hand. We owe them the epistemic service of listening. I would say something similar about the uneducated conspiracy theorists, and those who hold unreasonable beliefs. We might dismiss all testimony from these types out of hand, which is unfair for several reasons. First, people can be wrong about many things and yet right about a few things (without listening we don’t know what they are right about.) Moreover, even if people are wrong, they might have good reasons for their beliefs. And lastly, it simply seems a type of epistemic injustice to dismiss out of hand, and not even offer the basic epistemic courtesy of listening. Aberdein (2014) discusses similar ideas, i.e., he stresses the importance of listening in argument. 8 A sampling of this literature includes Tobias 1994; Renninger 2015; Schiefele 1999; Kpolovie 2014; and Silvia 2008.

References Aberdein, A. (2014). In defence of virtue: The legitimacy of agent-based argument appraisal. Informal Logic 34(1), 77–93. Baehr, J. (2006). Character, reliability and virtue epistemology. The Philosophical Quarterly 56(223), 193–212. Battaly, H. (2008). Virtue epistemology. Philosophy Compass 3(4), 639–663.

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Burroughs, M. D., and D. Tollefsen. (2016). Learning to listen: Epistemic injustice and the child. Episteme 13(3), 359–377. Carel, H., and I. J. Kidd. (2014). Epistemic injustice in healthcare: A philosophical analysis. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17(4), 529–540. Clarke, S. (2007). Conspiracy theories and the internet: Controlled demolition and arrested development. Episteme 4(2), 167–180. Coady, D. (2003). Conspiracy theories and official stories. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 17(2), 197–209. Coady, D. (2007a). Are conspiracy theorists irrational? Episteme 4(2), 193–204. Coady, D. (2007b). Introduction: Conspiracy theories. Episteme 4(2), 131–134. Coady, D. (2019). Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. London: Routledge. Dentith, M. R. (2014). The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Driver, J. (2003). The conflation of moral and epistemic virtue. Metaphilosophy 34(3), 367–383. Fallis, D. (2004). Epistemic value theory and information ethics. Minds and Machines 14(1), 101–117. Fallis, D., and D. Whitcomb. (2009). Epistemic values and information management. The Information Society 25(3), 175–189. Greco, J. (2000). Two kinds of intellectual virtue. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60(1), 179–184. Greco, J. (2011). Virtues in epistemology. In P. K. Moser (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (pp. 287–315). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fleisher, W. (2017). Virtuous distinctions. Synthese 194(8), 2973–3003. Kawall, J. (2002). Other–regarding epistemic virtues. Ratio 15(3), 257–275. Keeley, B. L. (1999). Of conspiracy theories. The Journal of Philosophy 96(3), 109–126. Kessler, G. (2015). Huckabee’s claim that ‘global freezing’ theories from the 1970s shows the science is “not as settled” on climate change. Washington Post. https://www.was hingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/25/huckabees-claim-that-global-free zing-theories-from-the-1970s-shows-the-science-is-not-as-settled-on-climate-change/ ?utm_term=.be8d8b1d5685 (accessed March 18, 2019). Kpolovie, P. J., A. I. Joe, and T. Okoto. (2014). Academic achievement prediction: Role of interest in learning and attitude towards school. International Journal of Humanities Social Sciences and Education 1(11), 73–100. Lackey, J. (2018, online first). The duty to object. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. doi:10.1111/phpr.12563 Levy, N. (2007). Radically socialized knowledge and conspiracy theories. Episteme 4(2), 181–192. Moscovici, S., and C. F. Graumann. (1987). Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. New York: Springer-Verlag. Paternotte, C., and M. Ivanova. (2017). Virtues and vices in scientific practice. Synthese 194(5), 1787–1807. Pigden, C. (2007). Conspiracy theories and the conventional wisdom. Episteme 4(2), 219–232. Räikkä, J. (2009). On political conspiracy theories. Journal of Political Philosophy 17(2), 185–201. Renninger, K. A., S. Hidi, and A. Krapp (eds.). (2015). The Role of Interest in Learning and Development (Vol. 1). New York: Psychology Press.

Epistemic insensitivity 207 Schiefele, U. (1999). Interest and learning from text. Scientific Studies of Reading 3(3), 257–279. Silvia, P. J. (2008). Interest—The curious emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science 17(1), 57–60. Thaler, R. H., and C. R. Sunstein (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. London: Penguin Books. Tobias, S. (1994). Interest, prior knowledge, and learning. Review of Educational Research 64(1), 37–54. Woomer, L. (2017). Agential insensitivity and socially supported ignorance. Episteme 16(1), 73–91.

11 Intellectual snobs1 Charlie Crerar

11.1 Introduction I’ll start by introducing the two antiheroes of this chapter. Both are drawn from Muriel Spark’s 1988 A Far Cry from Kensington, a novel whose setting – the publishing world in 1950s London – provides rich pickings for those interested in intellectual snobbery. Its antagonist is a thin-skinned writer named Hector Bartlett, who attempts a campaign of revenge against the novel’s narrator, Mrs Hawkins, after she puts voice to the popular sentiment that he is a pretentious hack. Mrs Hawkins first introduces Hector Bartlett to us as follows: He used to waylay me in Green Park on my way to work or on my way home. Occasionally this amused me, for I might egg him on to show off his social superiority, and, not less, the superior learning that he claimed. For he knew the titles of all the right books, and the names of the authors, but it amounted to nothing; he had read very little … His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, farfetched verbosity, and long, Latin-based words. (Spark 1988: 39–40) Hector Bartlett’s intellectual shortcomings, both characterological and authorial, are detailed at some length in the novel. Less prominent but equally interesting for present purposes are those of our second antihero: Martin York. Martin York is Mrs Hawkins’ employer at Ullswater Press, a publishing firm that he eventually runs into the ground through both financial and creative mismanagement. A significant contributor to this, we discover, was his tendency to offer commissions to authors of questionable talent: Sometimes, I think, his desire to sign up these [frightful] books for his publishing house was not due to a lack of discrimination so much as to the common fallacy which assumes that if a person is a good, vivacious talker he is bound to be a good writer. This is by no means the case. But Martin York had another, special illusion: he felt that men or women of upper-class background and education were bound to have advantages of talent over writers

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of more modest origins … Publishers, for obvious reasons, attempt to make friends with their authors; Martin York tried to make authors of his friends. (ibid.: 38) I suspect many philosophers will have come across a few Hector Bartletts or Martin Yorks in their time: people who know (and who want you to know that they know) all the right books and authors and who load their writing with convoluted jargon, or who judge intellectual contributions on the prestige and background of those who present them, rather than the merit of the contribution itself. Of course, such characters are not confined to academia and publishing. They are recognisable in the sneering online commenter who would sooner correct someone’s grammar than engage with the substance of their arguments, in the friend who insists on mocking Harry Potter as ‘a children’s book’, and in the man who treats his long-distant Oxford education as a license to assume intellectual superiority over any interlocutor. Each of these examples are manifesting a shared epistemic vice: they are all intellectual snobs.2 My aim in this chapter is to develop an account of intellectual snobbery, and to draw some lessons from this specific vice for vice epistemologists more generally. In Section 11.2 I briefly motivate the idea that there is a form of snobbery that is a specifically intellectual vice. In Section 11.3 I draw a distinction between intellectual status and intellectual merit, and highlight the role it plays in snobbish judgements. Sections 11.4 and 11.5 are then devoted to the discussion of two distinct forms of intellectual snobbery: snobbery of motives and snobbery of sensibilities. Section 11.6 concludes.

11.2 Snobbery as an intellectual vice The first puzzle when thinking about intellectual snobbery concerns the kind of vice we’re dealing with. Is it actually an intellectual vice, something that picks out a specifically intellectual failing? Or is it really just snobbery about intellect, that is, a moral vice as it operates in the intellectual domain? Compare, for example, another trait that appears to straddle the moral–epistemic divide in this way: intellectual courage. Rather than trying to theorise a form of courage that is, in some sense, distinctively intellectual, virtue epistemologists have tended to think of intellectual courage as just a more general trait – courage – as manifested in the intellectual domain. Jason Baehr, for example, builds his account of intellectual courage on an account of courage simpliciter, which involves ‘responding in a certain way to a conflict between the achievement of a particular good and one’s own safety or well-being’. What makes intellectual courage specifically ‘intellectual’, he argues, is just that ‘the good in question is necessarily an intellectual one’ (Baehr 2011: 164). Perhaps an account of intellectual snobbery could follow the same strategy: start with an account of snobbery as a moral vice, before extrapolating to the intellectual domain. Although he does not talk about intellectual snobs specifically, Emrys Westacott (2012) can be read as taking this approach. Snobbery as a

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moral vice, for Westacott, involves ‘believing without sufficient justification that you are superior to another person in certain respects because you belong to or are associated with some group’ (2012: 115). The ‘intellectual’ element then comes in through some of the groups Westacott identifies as potentially providing the basis for such a belief: groups based on education, erudition, occupation, reading habits, and so on. The intellectual snob, on this account, would just be someone who thinks him- or herself a better person, and does so because of one of these intellectual facts about themselves. Note, though, just how minimal the sense is in which this counts as an ‘intellectual’ vice. Intellectual courage, in Baehr’s sense, may be derivative of a more general trait, but it nonetheless picks out a quality that is an important part of good epistemic agency. Snobbery about intellect in Westcott’s sense, however, will have at most an indirect effect on one’s approach to epistemic practice. The failing it picks out – the tendency to think of oneself as a better person than others – is a moral one, and it is largely by-the-by that this judgement is made on an intellectual basis. The intellectual snobs I am interested in are those whose character corrupts their epistemic conduct in a much more direct way. My suggestion is that intellectual snobbery proper affects how one conducts one of the most fundamental epistemic practices: the practice of making intellectual evaluations. Intellectual evaluations are assessments of some object as good or bad according to some value that is distinctively intellectual. I use this term broadly along a variety of axes. First, we make intellectual evaluations about all manner of different objects: propositions, arguments, intellectual agents (oneself included), intellectual objects (such as books or institutions), and intellectual practices. Second, these evaluations invoke all sorts of different values. Some of these are narrowly epistemic, as when we assess the truth of a proposition, the credibility of an interlocutor, or the validity of an argument. Many, however, are intellectual in a broader sense, in that they affect how one conducts and directs oneself as an intellectual agent: the projects one engages in, the ways one conducts one’s inquiries, the habits and sensibilities one looks to cultivate, and so on. Thus, evaluations of a paper as interesting, a research area as worthwhile, or a potential university as appealing are all, at least in part, intellectual evaluations.3 Third, some intellectual evaluations are categorical (a proposition is either true or not), but many are comparative (as when we judge this argument to be more convincing than that one). And fourth, intellectual evaluations can be either occurrent or dispositional. They might take the form of either a specific act of appraisal, or an abiding and perhaps subconscious taste or preference. That there is some connection between intellectual snobbery and the practice of making intellectual evaluations is fairly clear. In fact, sometimes we describe peoples as snobs simply because of their tendency make very robust evaluations of superiority and inferiority: the friend who reflexively tuts when they see someone reading a tabloid newspaper, for example. This colloquial use of snob, though, is clearly too broad to capture the idea of snobbery as a vice. Intellectual evaluations are a central part of our epistemic lives, and virtue cannot be a matter of avoiding

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or shying away from them. Rather, it is about making them in a responsible fashion. It is here where we should look for our account of intellectual snobbery.

11.3 Intellectual status and intellectual merit The question at hand, then, is how to differentiate the properly discerning intellectual agent – one who makes intellectual evaluations, and potentially even quite robust ones, but who does so on an appropriate basis – from the intellectual snob. At this point, it will be helpful to return to Hector Bartlett, the first of our paradigm snobs. Recall that the reason why Mrs Hawkins initially found his knowledge of ‘all the right books, and the names of all the authors’ so amusing was the fact that, in spite of all his name-dropping, he had clearly ‘read very little’ (Spark 1988: 39). A reviewer reaches a similar conclusion when attempting to make headway with the manuscript for Bartlett’s intended masterpiece, grandly titled The Eternal Quest: A Study of the Romantic-Humanist Position. Bartlett, the reviewer quickly concludes, is ‘completely phoney’: ‘On every page Nietzsche, Aristotle, Goethe, Ibsen, Freud, Jung, Huxley, Kierkegaard, and no grasp whatsoever of any of them’ (ibid.: 94–95). The problem with Bartlett is not simply that he is interested in Nietzsche, Aristotle, and the rest;4 these are, after all, major intellectual figures, and engaging with their work can be a fruitful and fulfilling exercise.5 The problem is not even that he does not fully understand them; this is not ideal for an author working on these figures, but nor is it necessarily indicative of intellectual vice. The problem, instead, is that he affects understanding that he evidently lacks, with the clear insinuation that he does so precisely because of the intellectual heft that these authors carry. In short, what makes him a snob is not that he is interested in weighty books and fashionable authors, but that he is only interested in them because they are weighty and fashionable. My initial claim, then, is that what makes someone an intellectual snob is not the content or even the strength of their intellectual evaluations, but rather the considerations upon which these evaluations are based.6 I have already gestured at the relevant distinction, but we can clarify it further by introducing some rough terminology. First, there are what I refer to as an object’s intellectual merits.7 In essence, intellectual merits are an object’s positive intellectual qualities: its strengths, proficiencies, benefits, and so on. Clearly this is a loose and heterogeneous category, and there is no one quality that is the quality of being intellectually meritorious. The intellectual merits of a person might be their intellectual virtues, skills, or intelligence, the merits of an argument might include its validity or explanatory power, the merits of a university might be the quality of education it provides or its research output, and so on. What constitutes an intellectual merit in the case of a specific evaluation will be determined both by the nature of the object in question and the purposes and context of the evaluation. Second, there is an object’s intellectual status. This is the way it is perceived and the reputation it enjoys, qua intellectual object, within a society or social group. Sometimes intellectual status is awarded as a fairly direct response to

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perceived intellectual merit, with the status enjoyed by revered public intellectuals and challenging best-sellers good examples of this. Typically, though, the relation between status and merit is more complicated. For a start, certain properties can come to enjoy intellectual status not because they themselves constitute a way of being intellectually meritorious, but because they are associated with properties that do. An affiliation with a prestigious university is not itself an intellectual merit, for example, but it confers intellectual status on account of the connection believed to exist between that affiliation and intellectually meritorious qualities. Of course, a range of more problematic attributes can come to be associated with intellectual merit in this way, as when accents come to be associated with levels of education or age with a refinement of interest. The connection between status and merit is further complicated when broader societal values and prejudices come to affect the distribution of intellectual status. In the UK, for example, qualities like sobriety, tradition, and eloquence all enjoy intellectual status to an extent that cannot be explained by appeal to even a (supposed) indirect connection to intellectual merit. Intellectual evaluations, we have seen, are evaluations of an object’s intellectual qualities. They therefore just are, at least in part, evaluations of intellectual merit. This does not mean, however, that they will always actually be based upon or responsive to intellectual merits. Other factors might serve to mediate – or corrupt – these evaluations. This is what happened with Hector Bartlett, and what I would suggest happens with intellectual snobs generally. They make their intellectual evaluations not (or not primarily) on the basis of a direct assessment of an object’s intellectual merits, but on the basis of its status or reputation within their social group. This insight – that the intellectual snob appeals to considerations of status when making intellectual evaluations – only brings us part of the way to developing an account of intellectual snobbery. This is because considerations of intellectual status actually play a role in many of our judgements, often in ways that seem entirely unobjectionable. This point has recently been noted by Alessandra Tanesini, in a discussion of the role played by esteem – which is relevantly similar to intellectual status8 – in facilitating judgements about the testimony of experts: Individuals are often faced with the task of adjudicating between contradictory testimonies, or of deciding whether to change their pre-existing opinions in the light of the views expressed by their critics. It is not always feasible or possible to proceed by assessing independently the likely truth of the views themselves. One may lack either the resources or the knowledge required rationally to evaluate the positions at hand. Further, one may also be unable to evaluate the competence of the disagreeing would-be experts. In some of these cases esteem supplies evidence that assists one’s evaluation. (Tanesini 2018a: 53) As for expert testimony specifically, so too for intellectual evaluations generally. We often find ourselves unable to assess the merits of intellectual objects directly.

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Sometimes, as Tanesini notes, this is because we lack the time, skills, or resources to do so. Alternatively, it may be because doing so would defeat the point of making that evaluation in the first place. When moving into a new research area, for example, you might want to know the most important papers published on that topic so you can work out where to start your reading. The best place to start reading, however, is not something you can determine by directly assessing the contributions to that field, since doing so would require doing just the thing you’re trying to strategise: namely, starting reading. As Tanesini points out, intellectual status can provide a valuable workaround in situations like these. The correlation between status and merit is by no means perfect, as we have just seen, but sometimes it is all we have to go on. As such, it cannot be the case that making evaluations on this basis is problematic across the board. What, then, is vicious about how the intellectual snob does this? This question will be my focus for the remainder of this chapter.

11.4 Snobbish motives A helpful starting point will be to think in more general terms about what it is that makes traits intellectually vicious. One common approach here is to offer a motivational analysis of intellectual vice. According to this motivational approach, intellectual vices are traits that involve bad epistemic motivations (Baehr 2010; Battaly 2016; Tanesini 2018b). These motivations come in two parts. First, there are the proximate motivations of a given vice: a set of dispositions to act, think, and feel in certain ways. Thus, the proximate motivations of closed-mindedness centrally involve something like the motivation to ignore relevant epistemic options, stubbornness involves the motivation to persist in some approach in defiance of feedback from others, and so on. Sets of proximate motivations are unique to specific vices, even if, as these examples just offered illustrate, there will often be some overlap between vices. Theories of the nature of specific vices are therefore, to a significant extent, accounts of their distinctive proximate motivations. What makes any of these sets of proximate motivations intellectual vices in the first place, however, is the fact that they are underpinned by a shared set of ultimate motivations. Thus, according to the motivational approach, all intellectually vicious character traits are ultimately motivated by some desire for epistemic bads: they are patterns of thought, feeling, and action that one exercises in an attempt to remain ignorant, or to acquire false or comforting beliefs, or beliefs that fit with your pre-existing worldview.9 So, the closed-minded will ignore relevant epistemic options, and will do so because they wish to remain ignorant about some uncomfortable truth. We can identify a form of intellectual snobbery that fits the framework of the motivational approach. The proximate motivations are clear enough: intellectual snobbery involves a motivation to evaluate things, at least in part, on the basis of their intellectual status, rather than according to their actual intellectual merits. It is the ultimate motivations that are more interesting. This is because not just any set of ultimate ends, even when conjoined with these proximate motivations,

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count as snobbish. Imagine someone who, like Hector Bartlett, bases all his judgements about which authors to engage with purely on their ranking within the Western literary canon. The reason he does so is simply because he is scared of going out on a limb. He works in a deeply traditional and hierarchical field, and thinks that if he goes beyond the canon he will open himself up to ridicule and, potentially, a loss of livelihood. He knows he shouldn’t be relying upon status, but does so anyway because his main interest is preserving his place in the profession. Certainly his profession is a snobbish one, and these snobbish norms are something he is helping to perpetuate. However, snobbery doesn’t quite pick out his individual character failing. Rather, he seems more like an intellectual coward, or a conformist. Compare this with the actual Hector Bartlett. Far from just trying to fit in and go unnoticed, his main concern is with setting himself apart: specifically, with establishing himself as intellectually superior to other people, as smarter, more cultured, and as moving in better circles. The only reason he wants to be a writer, we learn, is because he fancies himself as ‘a great critic, a sort of thinker’, and he ‘wants to see his name in print’ (Spark 1988: 142). Similarly, it is his desire to ‘show off his social superiority, and, not less, the superior learning that he claimed’ that led him to name-drop incessantly in front of Mrs Hawkins, someone whom he assumes to be his inferior and who will thus, he thinks, be impressed by his behaviour (ibid.: 39). It is this underlying desire, to feel or appear superior to other people, that explains how sensitive he is to intellectual status. He hopes that by associating himself with markers of intellectual refinement – by knowing all the right books, fraternising with the right people, and peppering his writing with the right jargon – people will come to think of him as some superior intellect. The temptation at this point might be to dismiss Hector Bartlett as a slightly tragic figure, bumbling and pretentious perhaps, but nothing worse. This, though, is only part of the story. As Judith Shklar reminds us, when thinking about snobbery it is important that we don’t see ‘only the upward striving’ and ‘[forget] the kick aimed downward’ (Shklar 1984: 89). In other words, if we are too busy rolling our eyes at Bartlett’s tendency to shamelessly court the great and the good at parties, then we might miss his more obviously pernicious impact upon the less status-worthy, the ‘literary agents and authors of little fame’ who are left hovering ‘warily round the fringe’ (Spark 1988: 92). Superiority is an inherently relative notion: it requires not just being better than some other person or group, but that person or group being worse than you. Accordingly, the snob who is attempting to establish their superiority will be equal parts ingratiating and sneery, distancing themselves from the low-brow or marginalised just as avidly as they pursue a connection with the high-brow and established. In its manifestations as both an upward striving and a kick aimed downwards, this desire to feel or appear superior to others is recognisable in a host of other intellectual snobs, from the person who turns down participation in an interesting research project only because it is associated with a comparatively minor institution, to the person whose go-to move in online debates is to correct the other person’s grammar. This, then, is our first form of intellectual snobbery, which we

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can think of as a ‘snobbery of motives’. It picks out the person who is disposed to appraise things on the basis of their intellectual status, and who does out of a desire to feel or appear superior to some other individual or group.

11.5 Snobbish sensibilities My discussion of snobbery of motives was predicated upon a motivational analysis of intellectual vice. Although highly influential, this analysis has recently been called into question by theorists who have queried whether the presence of bad epistemic motivations is always necessary for intellectual vice (Crerar 2018, Cassam 2019). It is in this connection that intellectual snobbery proves a particularly interesting case for vice epistemologists. This is because, whilst there is a form of intellectual snob who, like Hector Bartlett, is characterised by bad motivations, this is not the only form of intellectual snob. It is here that our second paradigm snob comes into play. This, recall, is Martin York, a director who sunk the publishing firm Mrs Hawkins worked at because he only published books by ‘his fellow-officers of war-time, or former school friends’ (Spark 1988: 17). As we have already seen, Mrs Hawkins speculates that York’s bad judgement was not due to a ‘lack of discrimination’, by which she presumably means he did have some grounds for making these decisions. The problem, instead, was that the grounds were shoddy ones. Specifically, he tended to think that ‘if a person is a good, vivacious talker he is bound to be a good writer’, and that those ‘of upper-class background and education were bound to have advantages of talent over writers of more modest origins’ (ibid.: 38). Martin York’s problem, we can now recognise, was that he would base his evaluation of manuscripts on facts about the intellectual status of its author – facts about their background, education, and mannerisms, and how these resonate with society’s image of a good writer – and not on an actual appreciation of its intellectual merits. In this sensitivity to status, he is therefore very like Hector Bartlett. However, the two are also crucially different. Bartlett’s disposition is problematic because it is rooted in a desire to feel or appear superior to others. At no point, however, is there any indication that York’s judgements are similarly motivated. We have just seen, for a start, that Mrs Hawkins does not attribute his reliance on status to the self-aggrandising intent that she recognises in Bartlett; indeed, she relates that York is keenly aware of the need to sign good books (rather than just books that make him seem good), if only for the good of the firm (Spark 1988: 17). Instead, she attributes his failings to the sincere, albeit woefully mistaken, view that aspects of an author’s background really are predictive of intellectual merit. Furthermore, unlike the deeply insecure Bartlett, York’s intellectual superiority relative to the general population is something of which he seems totally assured. Even at his nadir, imprisoned for fraud and castigated by the press, he remains unfailing in his conviction that he deserves a place amongst the intelligentsia of high society. As he earnestly proclaims to Mrs Hawkins from his cell, ‘I have a first-rate brain, some say brilliant’ (ibid.: 47).

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The puzzle the motivational approach was invoked to solve, recall, was to explain what is vicious about the snob’s appeals to intellectual status, given that many such appeals are entirely unobjectionable. The motivational analysis can explain this in cases like Bartlett’s precisely because he is using status quite differently from the ways suggested by Tanesini. Specifically, he is not treating it as a work-around in judgements of intellectual merit, but as a shortcut to help cultivate a certain image of himself. The same, however, cannot be said of Martin York. The reason he appeals to intellectual status is because he thinks it provides a reliable shortcut when making evaluations of intellectual merit.10 The problem, of course, is that he is wrong about this; or, to put the point more perspicuously, he is too sensitive to considerations of intellectual status, such that he makes use of them even in cases where to do so is clearly irresponsible. As a consequence, he habitually dismisses authors and their work when he shouldn’t, grants disproportionate credence to those who clearly don’t warrant it, and maintains an absurdly inflated view of his own intellectual prowess despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. The kind of snobbery on display here is thus crucially different from the snobbery of motives discussed previously. My suggestion is that what makes Martin York an intellectual snob is not anything to do with the quality of his epistemic ends, but rather is to do with the calibration of his epistemic sensibilities. Our sensibilities are particular patterns of attention that jointly comprise our characteristic way of looking at the world. In the epistemic case, they determine the considerations to which we are particularly sensitive in the conduct of our epistemic activities, and those that we tend to ignore. To borrow a phrase from Miranda Fricker, these sensibilities enable us to see the world in ‘epistemic colour’ (2007: 71), such that certain aspects of a situation strike one as more relevant to epistemic judgements than others. The problem for Martin York is that considerations of intellectual status strike him as more vivid than they should. Thanks, presumably, to his upbringing, education, and social circles, he has developed a view of the world according to which intellectual status is seen as a particularly powerful predictor, if not determinant, of intellectual merit. So close is this connection in his mind that even when his epistemic ends are entirely appropriate – he genuinely wants to appraise the true quality of a manuscript, for example – considerations of intellectual status will nonetheless strike him as amongst the most salient factors to consider. Although I suspect that vice epistemologists would benefit from devoting more attention to the role of epistemic sensibilities within one’s intellectual character, fleshing out the details of this account goes far beyond the scope of this chapter. My aim here, instead, is more focused: to establish that, in addition to the snobbery of motivations already discussed, there is also a snobbery of sensibilities. The former is the snobbery of the epistemologist who dismisses feminist philosophy as ‘not real philosophy’ in order to shore up their image of themselves as a more rarefied intellect; the latter is the snobbery of the epistemologist who just accepts that they are a superior intellect, because of the status enjoyed by their research area. The former is the snobbery of someone who only reads broadsheet

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newspapers in an attempt to cultivate an air of intellectual refinement; the latter is the snobbery of someone who genuinely believes they are more intellectually refined than others on the basis of the newspaper they read. This, then, is the general idea behind the notion of snobbish sensibilities: that it is an excessive sensitivity to intellectual status that leads to unwarranted conclusions of intellectual superiority and inferiority. Much remains to be said, however, about where exactly this snob goes wrong in their intellectual evaluations, and what it is that makes their doing so snobbish. I shall discuss each of these issues in turn. 11.5.1 Status as proxy One helpful way to think about the role that intellectual status plays in responsible intellectual evaluations is as a proxy for intellectual merit. In general, a proxy variable is a variable that correlates more or less reliably with some further variable, the ‘target’ variable. We employ a proxy variable when we have some interest in measuring the target variable, but where doing so directly is either impossible or else excessively time- or resource-consuming. This difference in ease of measurement can motivate the use of a proxy even when its correlation with the target variable is only quite loose. So, for example, social scientists use average income as a proxy for well-being not because it provides a perfect indication of the latter, but because it gives a rough impression at only a fraction of the difficulty of measurement. As I noted in Section 11.3, there is often at least an indirect connection between intellectual status (the intellectual reputation some object enjoys) and intellectual merit (its actual intellectual qualities). This is why employing the former as a proxy for the latter is not necessarily an epistemically irresponsible thing to do. The motivational snob, of course, doesn’t use status as a proxy in this way; all they care about is how status might reflect back upon themselves. This explains where they go wrong in their evaluations. Things are more complicated for the person with snobbish sensibilities, since they do use status as a proxy. Martin York, we have seen, genuinely did think that class and verbosity were correlated with writing ability. The question we need to ask, therefore, is when it is responsible to use status as a proxy, and when it is not. The basic point to bear in mind here is that proxies rely for their explanatory power on the presence of a correlation between the proxy and target variables. Generally speaking, the stronger the correlation, the better the proxy. Perhaps the most straightforward manifestation of a snobbish sensibility, therefore, will simply be someone’s taking intellectual status to be relevant when it is in fact not, or where the correlation between status and merit is only very weak. Alternatively, they might use a marker of intellectual status that is in fact correlated with some form of intellectual merit in an evaluation of a quite different form of merit. Bear in mind that I am using ‘intellectual merit’ not to pick out a specific property, but as a catch-all to accommodate the full diversity of positive intellectual attributes. In most cases, even justifiably earned intellectual status will correlate with only a few dimensions of intellectual merit. Thus, even if Martin York was right that

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there is a connection between facts about someone’s educational history and, say, their knowledge-base – someone with a literature degree, for example, is likely to know more about aspects of literature than the general population – he would still not be warranted in making the sweeping judgements that he does. Intellectual status’ role as a proxy for merit can also explain the snob’s attitudes towards other forms of evidence. We have seen that proxies are typically invoked when there is a paucity of easily accessible direct evidence about the target variable. The existence of a very strong proxy correlation, however, might justify deferring to that proxy even in the presence of direct evidence. In other words, it is sometimes reasonable to trust a reliable and easily accessible proxy over one’s own capacity to interpret evidence directly. Take, for example, someone who has never read Wittgenstein, but who ranks him as a profound and important philosopher on the basis of his reputation. There is nothing obviously snobbish about this judgement, since within the community of academic philosophers there probably is quite a strong correlation between someone’s enjoying a positive intellectual status qua philosopher and their being intellectually meritorious in some of the ways that are constitutive of excellence as a philosopher.11 In fact, the strength of this correlation is such that it is not obviously snobbish for this person to continue to rank Wittgenstein as a profound and important philosopher even after engaging with his work directly, and finding it somewhat underwhelming. The problem with the snob, of course, is that they take status to be far more reliable as a proxy then it in fact is. As a consequence, they will take this sceptical attitude towards direct evidence when there is not the strength of proxy relation to justify it. Martin York, for example, did have direct evidence of the things he was trying to measure indirectly – he was reading the manuscripts, after all – but he continually discounted its significance relative to the evidence provided by the proxy. 11.5.2 Snobbish judgements Thus far, I have identified snobbish sensibilities simply with an undue sensitivity to considerations of intellectual status. This, though, is in need of further refinement, since it is clear that not just any such sensitivity counts as snobbish. To see why, consider the informal role that markers of intellectual status play in excluding students from less privileged backgrounds from elite universities. It is often suggested that one mechanism of exclusion at institutions like Oxbridge is that students from lower-income backgrounds or without a family history of higher education feel out of place when confronted by these universities’ international reputation, illustrious history, and imposing architecture. You might have all the academic attributes required to flourish there, and yet still be thrown – as one student put it – by the ‘simple intimidation of “oh God this room is in a literal castle”’ (Curtis 2017). At least sometimes, what is going wrong here is that these prospective students are being too sensitive to considerations of intellectual status: they are judging their suitability for a particular education on the status their own background

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conveys vis-à-vis the status of that institution. However, although there is clearly something amiss with these evaluations, it seems wrong to describe such students as snobs. This, surely, is an epithet that we reserve for the privileged student, the one who concludes on the basis of their family history and prior educational background that they ‘belong’ in such environs. This contrast serves to illustrate an analogous point to the example of the conformist version of Hector Bartlett, introduced in our discussion of snobbish motives. In both cases, what is highlighted is the connection between intellectual snobbery and judgements of one’s own superiority relative to some other individual or group. Being a snob is not just to have an unwarranted preoccupation with status, but to have a preoccupation with status that, amongst other things, leads one to look down on others whom one views as inferior. The refinement needed for snobbery of sensibilities is therefore as follows: it is the vice of being excessively attuned to considerations of intellectual status, in a way that leads one to conclude that one is superior to some other individual or group. Insofar as this refinement suggests that a snobbish sensibility only manifests itself in relative evaluations of the intellectual merits of different people, this might seem an unwelcome restriction on the scope of intellectual snobbery. After all, many of the examples of paradigm snobbish judgements that I have given throughout this chapter are judgements about the intellectual merits of ‘things’: books, institutions, methodologies, and so on.12 Of course, sometimes evaluations of things are premised quite directly on evaluations of people. Martin York’s snobbery, for example, might manifest itself in a dismissive attitude towards a manuscript written by a working-class person, but what he is really dismissive of here is the aptitudes of the working class. Other examples, though, are trickier to accommodate. Consider another kind of literature snob: not someone (like Hector Bartlett) who is determined to cultivate an air of refinement and intellect, or someone (like Martin York) who bases their evaluations on the social background of authors, but someone who simply thinks that reading anything other than ‘the classics’ is a waste of time. Can my account accommodate the intuition that there is something snobbish going on here? I think it can, but only because I suspect that the whiff of snobbery that pervades this example depends on the assumption that his wrinkling his nose at certain genres of literature is, in fact, accompanied by a wrinkling of the nose at certain kinds of people. One possibility is that his taste in literature is itself guided, in part, by judgements about which genres are appropriate for different kinds of people. He might condescendingly dismiss certain types of writing as ‘chick lit’, say, or as suitable only for people without the education to appreciate the classics. These dismissals thus invoke judgements about the merits of different groups of people, judgements that are based upon facts about their intellectual status and that, at least implicitly, class him as one of the intellectually superior. Such judgements are, of course, paradigmatically snobbish. Let’s try to close off this reading. Suppose that our literature snob simply thinks of light fiction as a totally vacuous form of literature, and does so without presupposing a condescending view of any particular type of person. As he might

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put it, he simply thinks that we are all ‘better than that’. In this case, I would have to concede that there is nothing snobbish about his tastes in literature, since in no way do they involve a judgement of his own superiority. Nonetheless, perhaps there is a different snobbery at play here that can explain our intuitions: namely, the snobbery of evaluating yourself as intellectually superior on the basis of your intellectual evaluations. Tastes, preferences, and judgement are all viable candidates for designations of intellectual status: people can be and are intellectually revered for their taste in literature, film, radio stations, and so on. This creates space for a form of higher-order snobbery, according to which the light fiction cynic thinks of himself as superior because he, unlike everyone else, has seen the light when it comes to literature. There are thus two ways in which snobbery of sensibilities – a sensitivity to intellectual status that leads to unwarranted conclusions of one’s own superiority – can affect evaluations of the intellectual merits of things: it might be a sense of one’s own superiority that underlies these evaluations, and one can judge oneself to be superior on the basis of these evaluations. If we strip this example of any hint of either of these attitudes, then we would be left with someone who concludes, on the basis of intellectual status, that light fiction is not something of any intellectual merit, but who also maintains that there is nothing intellectually inferior about those who do read it. This person would not count as an intellectual snob in either of the senses I have identified. This, I think, is exactly the right result. Harbouring a blanket and stubborn aversion to a whole family of literature might still be intellectually vicious: it might be closed-minded, or conformist, or a form of epistemic insensibility (Battaly 2013). However, absent some sneering judgement about the intellectual merits of different types of people, snobbery does not seem quite right.

11.6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have identified two distinct kinds of intellectual snob. One is the person who guides their intellectual evaluations by way of an appeal to intellectual status, and who does so in an attempt to make themselves feel or appear superior to others. The other is the person who is simply too sensitive to intellectual status, and who thus habitually draws conclusions of their own superiority relative to others. These traits are clearly related: both are dispositions to make use of intellectual status, and both have a close connection to a view (desired or actual) of one’s intellectual superiority. As important, though, are their differences, with one a vice of motivation, the other a vice of sensibility. It is the latter that will prove of most interest to epistemologists looking to move beyond a motivational account of intellectual vice.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Quassim Cassam, Miranda Fricker, Jules Holroyd, and Cody Turner for very helpful comments on drafts of this chapter. Thanks also to audiences in

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Manchester, Vienna, Sheffield, and Connecticut, and to Pauline and Graham Crerar, whose book recommendations are always appropriately sensitive to intellectual merits. As I have implied, there are really two forms of snobbery here: snobbery as akin to a sneery pretentiousness, and snobbery as akin to elitism. I will argue that, when fully spelt out, both traits constitute a form of intellectual snobbery, and that whilst there are interesting differences between the two there are also important commonalities. I have noticed, though, that people sometimes have different intuitive reactions to these vignettes; specifically, that people with British or other European backgrounds sometimes claim that the real snobbery is Martin York’s comfortable elitism, whilst North Americans are more prone to identify it with the affected disdain of Hector Bartlett. I suspect that this discrepancy has something to do with the functioning of the class systems in these different societies, though I cannot pursue this point here. In any case, my aim in this chapter is to vindicate the viciousness of both forms of snobbery. Some objects are apt for more than one form of evaluation: books and films, for example, might be assessed both intellectually and aesthetically. The boundaries between these domains will often not be sharp. This is not what Spark is trying to convey, in any case, though we might think that there is something amiss with someone whose intellectual horizons consist exclusively of white European men. Or so I presume, based on their reputations. I don’t think this makes me a snob, for reasons I discuss Section 11.5.1. My discussion here is heavily influenced by Kieran’s (2010) account of aesthetic snobbery. Henceforth, I use ‘object’ as a generic term for anything that can serve as the object of an intellectual evaluation. Esteem is a positive (or negative) evaluative attitude directed at a person or group for their good or bad qualities (Tanesini 2018a: 49). Tanesini is mainly interested in esteem as conferred by individuals, whilst I am thinking of intellectual status as something social. This is closer to what Tanesini calls ‘reputation’. Alternatively, we might think of vicious motivations as involving the absence of a concern for epistemic goods. Of course, bad faith or self-deception about his ultimate ends is one explanation here. I see no reason why this should be the only plausible explanation. That the presence of a good reputation is correlated with intellectual merit does not entail that the absence of a good reputation is strongly correlated with a lack of intellectual merit. Proxies can be asymmetrically reliable. This distinction between snobbery about people and snobbery about things is also an issue for Westacott (2012).

References Baehr, J. (2010) ‘Epistemic Malevolence’, in Battaly, H. (ed.) Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 189–213. Baehr, J. (2011) The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtue and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Battaly, H. (2013) ‘Detecting Epistemic Vice in Higher Education Policy: Epistemic Insensibility in the Seven Solutions and the REF’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 47 (2), 263–280. Battaly, H. (2016) ‘Epistemic Virtue and Vice: Responsibilism, Reliabilism, and Personalism’, in Mi, C., M. Slote, and E. Sosa. (eds.) Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Chinese and Western Philosophy: The Turn Towards Virtue (New York: Routledge), 99–120.

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Cassam, Q. (2019) Vices of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press). Crerar, C. (2018) ‘Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (4), 753–766. Curtis, D. (2017) ‘Oxford is Accepting More State School Pupils – In the South East at Least’, New Statesman. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/educati on/2017/10/oxford-accepting-more-state-school-pupils-south-east-least (accessed on March 20th 2019). Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kieran, M. (2010) ‘The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification, and Virtue in Art Appreciation’, The Philosophical Quarterly 60 (239), 243–263. Shklar, J. (1984) Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press). Spark, M. (1988) [2017] A Far Cry from Kensington (Edinburgh: Polygon Books). Tanesini, A. (2018a) ‘Caring for Esteem and Intellectual Reputation: Some Epistemic Benefits and Harms’, in Barker, S., C. Crerar, and T. Goetze (eds.) Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 47–67. Tanesini, A. (2018b) ‘Epistemic Vice and Motivation’, Metaphilosophy 49 (3), 350–367. Westacott, E. (2012) The Virtues of Our Vices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Part IV

Applied vice epistemology

12 Teaching to the test How schools discourage phronesis Casey Johnson

In this chapter I defend the claim that dominant approaches to contemporary education discourage epistemic virtue not by encouraging the development of vices directly, but by discouraging students from developing epistemic phronesis. Students subjected to education by rote memorization or test-focused teaching are discouraged from knowing when and how to use their epistemic virtues in school. Nonetheless, they still display epistemic virtues in many parts of their lives – they simply don’t seem to know that school is a place where these virtues apply. Contemporary schooling, then, is epistemically corrupting in a way that is related, but not identical, to Kidd’s sense of the word: it corrupts by preventing the development of phronesis (Kidd, 2015). And it ought not to be – educational contexts like formal schooling should not only help students develop their epistemic virtues, but should also help them use those virtues in the right way at the right time. In other words, schools should be one place where epistemic phronesis is encouraged and developed. This chapter will build on work on educating for the virtues from Battaly (Battaly, 2006), Watson (Watson, 2018), Kidd (Kidd, 2017), and others, as well as from data on educational outcomes from students in the U.S. after “No Child Left Behind” (Duffy, Giordano, Farrell, Paneque, & Crump, 2009; Hursh, 2007; McCarthey, 2008; Rushton & Juola-Rushton, 2008).

12.1 Sarah and Wallace In the first season of the HBO show, The Wire, there’s a scene involving a math problem. Wallace, a teenager who cares for younger children, is awoken by one of his young charges, Sarah, who needs his help with her math homework. Sarah attends a Baltimore, MD, public school. Being a Baltimore public school means, as the show’s viewers know, that Sarah’s school is understaffed, underfunded, and (almost certainly) failing to meet state educational standards. Sarah and Wallace are also involved in illegal drug sales. Sarah and Wallace have the following exchange: “Yo, Wallace.” “What?”

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“What’s this about here?” “This one here? ‘A bus traveling on Central Avenue begins its route by picking up eight passengers. Next, it picks up four more, and then an additional two, while discharging one. At the next-to-last stop, three passengers get off the bus and another two get on. How many passengers are on the bus at the last stop?’ Just do it in your head.” “Seven, right? … Eight?” “Damn, Sarah, look. Close your eyes. You working a ground stash. 20 tall pinks. Two fiends come up and ask for two each, another one cops three. Then Bodie hands you 10 more, but a white guy rolls up in a car waves you down, and pays for eight. How many vials you got left?” “Fifteen.” “How the fuck can you keep the count right, but not do the book problem?” “Count be wrong, they’ll fuck you up.” In this exchange, Sarah has the skills necessary to do both math problems. Indeed, the problem that Wallace gives her is more complicated than the one she needs to do for homework. However, she does not, or is not able to bring those skills to bear on the book problem. What is going on here? It may be that the explanation is simple: Sarah herself suggests that the degree of motivation is different. She is highly motivated by the threat of violence to keep accurate count of how many vials of drugs she has. There is no such threat in the case of the book problem. So she is, perhaps, simply insufficiently motivated to apply her math skills to the book problem. However, I don’t think this is a convincing explanation for the whole of the difference between these cases. She is motivated to solve the book problem – she asks her de facto guardian for help with it before school. Something other than motivation must be playing a role in this case. It may be that Sarah’s case seems implausible. It is, after all, from a work of fiction. We might think the show’s writers just invented a conversation that might happen in some fictional contexts, but deny that this conversation is realistic or even provides much insight into real-world experiences. However, we do see cases like Sarah’s happen in real-life educational contexts. Phillip Stevens, an Apache sociologist, gives examples of this in his work with Vanessa AnthonyStevens and Sheila Nicholas. Stevens recounts the ways in which native students can struggle in Western White educational systems when the values, norms, and vocabularies differ from those in their homes and communities: Educational scenarios where students are told new names to familiar actions can be absurd. However, if students can come to understand that concepts like tessellation have foundation in events such as stacking mesquite wood, rather than existing in isolation upon clean, white papers covered in abstract lined shapes, these same students can take this knowledge and find purpose in it so that it makes sense in their chosen community. (Anthony-Stevens, Stevens, & Nicholas, 2017)

Teaching to the test 227 The students who Stevens describes are familiar with a pertinent skill or concept or at least have the building blocks for such a skill. However, the schools they’re required to attend fail to draw out and to develop that familiarity. So, we cannot discount Sarah’s case as simply fantastic and implausible. And we cannot explain her situation away by pointing to some failure of motivation on her part. We have to explain why it is that a student who has certain skills or familiarity with certain concepts fails to use them in formal educational contexts. This will be the project of this chapter. I propose that part of the cause of Sarah’s situation is that schools discourage a particular kind of virtuous thinking – they discourage what I’ll call epistemic phronesis. I’ll defend this claim by first explaining that concept before going on to argue that contemporary education plays a role in discouraging epistemic phronesis. I’ll close by considering future work.

12.2 Epistemic phronesis In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines phronesis as “a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for a man” (1104b5). Phronesis is a kind of cultivated practical know-how. The person who has phronesis – the phronimos – knows when x is a suitable action, given the sort of context she is in. She has insight into how to act in a particular situation, manifested by a certain exemplary style of agency. The relationship between phronesis and other virtues is contentious. Some argue that phronesis is the “intellectual excellence that is operative in behavior that manifests good character” (McDowell, 1998, pp. 27–28). This would mean that phronesis is one intellectual virtue that a person can have. It may also be that the phronimos just has all the other virtues – that being phronetic is necessary and sufficient for being virtuous. Or, we might hold that phronesis is a virtue, but one of several higher-order virtues. Adjudicating this disagreement is beyond the scope of the current chapter. Indeed, my thesis should follow, albeit with some changes in wording, however the relationship is best understood. For the purposes of this chapter, I will follow Paul Bloomfield who, in his writing about phronesis, argues that “phronesis is necessary for all the virtues but is not sufficient” (Bloomfield, 2013, p. 288). We must be phronetic in order to manifest the other virtues, though we may need to do other things as well. The phronimos is able to accurately perceive what is to be done. This ability builds on a number of others. As Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove put it, “moral sensitivity, perception, imagination, and judgement informed by experience—phronesis in short—is needed to apply rules or principles correctly” (Hursthouse & Pettigrove, 2018). This means that knowing some set of rules or norms is insufficient. A person must also apply those rules in a way that is informed by the relevant features of the situation together with her experience. Only then will she have phronesis. A person has phronesis, as I understand it, when she is able to do two things: she must be able to sufficiently accurately assess the situation in which she finds

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herself. This is the perceptual/sensitivity part. She must also use that assessment to decide what to do. This might be by activating the right mental habits, or it might be by engaging in a degree of reflection on and understanding of her relevant experiences. She must properly assess the situation, and she must properly use that assessment, and then she will be in a position to know that this is an occasion to do that. A case may help illuminate phronesis further. Imagine that Sally is trying to be virtuous. She attempts to manifest the correct degree of courage, and to hit the golden mean of temperance. However, she makes mistakes about when to use the skills associated with each virtue. She attempts to be temperate when courage is called for. She has the skills to be virtuous, but she enacts them in the wrong contexts. Or, perhaps worse, she never identifies the contexts in which to use them. She’s practiced being temperate, or learned to be humble, but she fails to recognize those occasions on which she should bring those skills into play. We can imagine that Sally would be, counterfactually, virtuous if she only knew when to do what. Because of her lack of phronesis, Sally’s attempts to be virtuous are foiled. With this basic understanding of phronesis in place, we can return to Sarah and her math problem. Sarah has the skills necessary to do math. She knows how to follow the rules of arithmetic, even if she doesn’t know what those rules are called. She may not even know how to explain the rules – this would be a kind of meta-mathematical knowledge. However, it is clear from her conversation with Wallace that Sarah’s problem is not that she cannot do the math problem. Her problem, instead, is that she doesn’t know that this is a problem in which she can bring those particular arithmetic skills to bear. Sarah does not know that homework is an occasion to put her math-relevant experiences to use. This is either because she fails to assess the homework context properly or because she fails to use that assessment properly in deciding what to do. Of course, arithmetic skills aren’t always considered to be a virtue. Linda Zagzebski distinguishes between skills and virtues saying that skills have contingent value – they are good insofar as a situation makes them useful. Virtues, according to Zagzebski, have intrinsic value (Zagzebski, 1996). Similarly, Jason Baehr claims that skills are “abilities to perform certain reasonably specific or technical intellectual tasks” (Baehr, 2011, p. 29). We usually think of intellectual virtues as including such traits as curiosity, humility, tenacity, diligence, etc. While Sarah’s math problem-solving skills are intellectual skills, they aren’t clearly character traits and they don’t clearly have intrinsic value. This does not mean, however, that virtues and skills aren’t closely related. Many virtues involve enacting a skill. Verbal skills can help one to be a virtuous communicator, for example. It is important to keep in mind, though, that virtues and not skills are involved in phronesis. To better understand epistemic phronesis, we’ll make a brief detour into some of the details of virtue epistemology. There are two main schools of thought regarding epistemic virtues and vices. One, defended Zagzebski (among others), has it that virtues and vices are acquired character traits. They are, “deep quality of a person, closely identified with her selfhood” (Zagzebski, 1996, p. 104). Call this virtue-responsibilism. The other

Teaching to the test 229 main position, virtue-reliabilism, contends that virtues and vices are cognitive faculties, virtuous when they’re stable and reliable, and vicious otherwise. Virtuereliabilism has been defended most notably by Ernie Sosa (Sosa, 1980). To get clear on epistemic phronesis, I’ll discuss epistemic phronesis as it fits with each of these approaches to epistemic virtues and vices. First, we’ll turn to virtue-reliabilists. Sosa developed virtue-reliabilism in order to answer certain problems for his preferred account of justification, arguing that a person can be justified in forming the belief that x just in case that belief was formed by a reliable process (Sosa, 1980). A process is reliable just in case it produces more (maybe quite a few more) true beliefs than false ones. This focus on reliable processes leads virtue-realiabilists to diagnose as virtues traits like attentiveness, good memory, acute reasoning, etc. Persons who are disposed to attain more true beliefs than false ones – that is who use reliable belief-forming processes, are virtuous on this picture. Virtue-reliabilists are comparatively less interested in accounting for the various moving parts of Aristotelean virtue ethics and so don’t say much about phronesis. We can, however, fill in some details. A process may be reliable in some contexts and not in others, according to virtue-reliabilism. So, a person might be said to be a phronimos on such a view when she knows which belief-forming process to use in which context. She’ll use whichever is or are reliable. Next, let’s take the virtue-responsibilists. For a person to have an epistemic virtue, on this view, that person must have the characteristic in question in a particularly deep way. In describing this, Zagzebski writes that the characteristic “becomes entrenched in a person’s character and becomes a kind of second nature” (Zagzebski, 1996, p. 116). In addition to this depth, the virtuous person is also motivated use the character trait in question in order to form true beliefs. So, if a person has the virtue of curiosity, her curiosity comes naturally, and she is motivated to use her curiosity-related skills to improve her doxastic position. The virtue-responsibilist conceives of epistemic virtues as character-based traits such as inquisitiveness, humility, intellectual courage, etc. (Watson, 2015). Zagzebski’s view of phronesis is enlightening, not least for emphasizing that learning phronesis is a social matter. People learn to be virtuous by following the example of a phronimos. People learn what is to be done by seeing a practically wise person acting virtuously. Phronesis must be acquired by social experience. Epistemic phronesis, then, is a matter of being well-placed in a sufficiently healthy epistemic community. Indeed, Zagzebski says: When I am in a position of trying to find out whether or not to believe something, it is important for me to connect to the social network of beliefs in the proper way. I must know where to look – what books to read, which people to consult. (Zagzebski, 1996, p. 228) And this social network must be sufficiently receptive, supportive, and sensitive to my epistemic needs and abilities. If I am in such a position, I will better know which intellectual skills and traits to employ.1

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These are competing notions of intellectual virtues that produce competing concepts of phronesis. However, by using either one we can understand why phronesis is important and why formal education discourages it. To show this, and with these possible understandings of epistemic phronesis in mind I’ll close this section by considering two additional cases. Together with Sarah’s case discussed above, these cases demonstrate that a person might have the skills involved in an epistemic virtue (or have the trait to some degree, or use the process in some context), yet lack phronesis and so fail to deploy these virtues in formal educational contexts. Consider Jamie, a college student from a conservative Christian background. His parents taught him to value formal education as a means to an end and to treat authority figures with respect. Jamie finished high school with good grades and decent SAT scores and enrolled in his state’s land grant university. Jamie participates in a Christian fellowship group in a church just off campus. The group meets weekly to discuss matters of theology and faith over pizza. Jamie is frank and vocal in these conversations. He asks relevant, careful, and challenging questions. He takes argumentative and epistemic risks and demonstrates some flexibility about his beliefs at a granular level. Jamie is also enrolled in a political philosophy class to fulfil a general education requirement. Jamie disagrees with several of the values that he thinks are taken for granted in the class, but he does not speak up. When his professor gives arguments for liberal viewpoints, Jamie fails to listen in an open-minded way. He explains away her points as mere “identity politics” and “political correctness”. The views and theories are, to Jamie, like a kind of fiction he must learn about, but one that has little to do with his life. Jamie does not contribute to classroom discussions, though he is careful to do the reading and performs well on exams. He behaves respectfully toward his professor but does not deeply engage with the course content. On my analysis, Jamie lacks phronesis, and so doesn’t know how to follow the appropriate epistemic principles in this formal educational context. He has many of the epistemic skills necessary to make him a virtuous interlocutor. He is curious and inquisitive. He is open-minded to other people’s arguments regarding some subject-specific challenges to his beliefs. Yet when he is in a formal educational context, all of those traits fall by the wayside. Jamie understands his job in the classroom to be to read and regurgitate the information his professor tells him. He does not take any of the content onboard, nor does he engage with it critically. He is intransigent, not because he is engaging with the course content and digging into his antecedent views, but rather because he does not see the theories as having anything to do with him. As Jamie sees it, he is doing his part in the classroom. It doesn’t occur to him that he should or even could challenge the professor and engage in a dialog with her. If he did think about it, he wouldn’t see the point. This, he would think, is not the place where we do that. He has the skills, but he does not see the classroom as the place to deploy them. Next, consider Alex, an 18-year-old who wants to enter a technical college once she graduates high school. She plans to be a dental hygienist and knows that

Teaching to the test 231 she needs to do well in her biology class to get into her preferred program. One of the class requirements is a research paper on cell mitosis. Alex missed several days of class last semester due to a bad flu and does not have the notes on mitosis. She is entirely paralyzed by this situation. She has access to the library and the Internet, but she does not know how to use them in this novel way. This is despite the fact that Alex is a social media master. Alex can find out who is going to whose party with a few clicks and taps. She negotiates tricky social situations with grace and flexibility. She is able to seamlessly navigate different apps, to control what information goes where, and to solve complicated social and technological problems. When she doesn’t know how to solve a problem she is facing, Alex tries novel variations of solutions that have worked before on similar problems. She asks friends for information in careful, subtle, and effective ways. She is confident that there is a solution without being cocky that she already knows what the solution is. On my analysis, Alex, like Jamie and Sarah, lacks phronesis. She has epistemic traits relevant to solving her biology class problem: she is creative, and innovative and determined. She is humble and also tenacious. But she manifests these traits only outside of the classroom. She does not have experience being sensitive to epistemic possibilities in formal educational contexts the way she does in her social life. She fails to perceive that this is a context in which enacting the virtues would be right and proper. If we take on virtue-reliabilist’s understanding of phronesis, we can see that Jamie and Alex do not know what belief-forming processes to use in which contexts. Jamie does not know that questioning and challenging are reliable beliefforming processes in his classroom. While his religious upbringing has encouraged the development of those sorts of processes in the context of fellowship, his formal education has not done so. He doesn’t know that this is a place to use those skills. Alex does not know that she can use the same skills in the classroom that make her so successful online.2 If we take virtue-responsibilism, on the other hand, we can see that Jamie does not see his professor as the sort of person with whom he can converse. His previous formal education discouraged him from doing this, and did not provide him with any role models. He does not call on these traits as second nature, because he doesn’t know that this is a context in which to use them. And something similar is happening in Alex’s case. She is motivated to seek the truth about mitosis, but she doesn’t know – and no one has shown her – that she can be just as creative in her academic problem solving. School has not provided Alex or Jamie with any role models with phronesis. It has not given them the opportunity to develop their sense of what to do when. For Alex, Jamie, and Sarah, a lack of phronesis renders them unable to assess their epistemic environment properly. They have the relevant skills, they are developing the necessary virtues, but they fail to assess their situation properly and so fail to use that assessment in deciding what to do. This means that they don’t know what is to be done. They are not yet vicious, but they are nonetheless kept from being virtuous.

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To be clear, unlike Sarah’s case, or the case of the Apache student, these cases entirely are contrived: I made them up. So, I’m not claiming that these are real-life examples for which any good theory must account. I’m merely suggesting that these cases are plausible, and that the idea of a failure of epistemic phronesis allows us to get traction on what is going on in them. When we encounter students or other epistemic agents who appear not to have epistemic virtues in formal educational contexts, I encourage us to consider whether they are vicious, or whether they lack phronesis. I’m deliberately emphasizing formal educational contexts. This is because I think, as I’ll detail in the next section, that contemporary public education is a large part of the cause of failures of epistemic phronesis.

12.3 Educating against phronesis Contemporary public education in the United States is dominated by the legacy of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The act was adopted, in part, to increase federal and state-wide accountability for teachers and schools and to close the achievement gap between high- and low-performing schools – especially in those cases in which performance is correlated with school funding and/ or race. NCLB established requirements for teacher qualifications and for student achievement (Duffy et al., 2009). Schools that fail to meet state standards receive, in accordance with this act, various sanctions often including increased control of schools by state and federal authorities. As David Hursh puts it, These include providing students with: “supplemental services in the community such as tutoring, afterschool programs, remedial classes or summer school,” replacing the school staff, implementing a new curriculum, “decreasing management authority, appointing an outside expert to advise the school, extending the school day or year, or reorganizing the school internally.” Schools failing for five consecutive years must either reopen as a charter school, replace all or most of the school staff who are relevant to the failure to make adequate yearly progress, or turn over the operations either to the state or to “a private company with a demonstrated record of effectiveness” (US Department of Education, 2003c, pp. 6–9). Many of the “remedies,” such as tutoring, remedial classes and replacing the administration, provide opportunities for private corporations to profit from public funding. (Hursh, 2007, p. 297) These sanctions imposed an incentive structure on public schools to meet the standards laid out by NCLB. For student achievement, the act mandated regular periodic testing to establish whether students are meeting standards. These tests have high stakes for teachers, school administrators, and schools themselves. This has encouraged increased testing in math and reading, the areas emphasized by the act, increased “teaching to the test”, and decreased focus on subjects not emphasized by the act (Hursh, 2007). These subjects include social sciences, so-called

Teaching to the test 233 enrichment subjects like music and art, and, until very recently, natural sciences (Jennings & Rentner, 2006). This notion of “teaching to the test” is in our vernacular, but what does it involve? Education seems to require assessment, and certainly, we want to know how well schools are educating their students. However, “teaching to the test” is negatively connoted – it is often taken to be emblematic of the ills of contemporary education and education policy. So why is teaching to the test bad? Teaching to the test has involved two distinct aspects. First, there are the tests themselves – often rote-based and repetitive, these tests incentivize memorization and “parroting” rather than deep understanding. Second, there is the testing schedule – frequent high-stakes testing interrupts the flow of the school year and distracts teachers from other educational goals that would better meet their students’ needs. We can imagine having either of these aspects without the other. Indeed, some states have made efforts under the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to change the testing schedule. ESSA, which replaced NCLB in 2015, allows states to determine when and how often to test their students. We’ll briefly return to the ESSA below, noting here that while the new act may improve on NLCB, standardized testing remains central to the legislation. This means, in part, that we can anticipate that schools will continue to be incentivized to teach to the test. According to Louis Volante, teaching to the test involves certain kinds of test preparation practices. These might include repetitive exposure of students to questions from past tests, or test questions “cloned” from past test (questions with some variables and the answer changed). It might include rote memorization of likely test answers. In some cases, teachers faced with high-stakes testing have even given students test answers, changed student answer forms, or otherwise improperly influenced test results (Volante, 2004). Standardized testing is supposed to measure performance on various kinds of activities, testing types of skills, and using these as a measure of background ability. This means that teaching to the test, as described by Volante, renders standardized tests impractical and useless. So, teaching to the test is bad if we want to use standardized tests to assess student achievement. Teaching to the test is also bad for students’ learning outcomes.3 As Joan Herman puts it, “the time focused on test content has narrowed the curriculum by overemphasizing basic-skill subjects and neglecting higherorder thinking skills” (Herman, 1992, p. 74). Examples of higher-order thinking skills include thinking creatively, solving novel problems, constructing research projects, and identifying implicit assumptions (Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956; Zohar & Dori, 2003). It is worth noting that many of these higher-order thinking skills are involved or play a role in epistemic virtues. Consider curiosity, creativity, and humility, as examples. The effects of the NCLB continue to echo through public education even though ESSA has replaced that legislation. ESSA makes two notable changes to NCLB. The first is to allow states, rather than the federal government, to determine the details of the schedule of consequences for schools that fail to meet state standards. The second is to give states more control over the number and length

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of tests that students take. One year into the transition from NCLB to ESSA, 25 states reported interest in decreasing the amount of testing to which their students are subjected (Rentner, Kober, & Frizzell, 2017). This, perhaps, reflects a realization that this testing has deleterious educational effects. Students who receive their education by rote memorization or test-focused teaching receive a particular kind of education. This kind of education is, at least in some ways, quite narrow and fails to encourage higher-order thinking. Even as state standards expand to include natural sciences, students’ success is measured by performance on a test. These tests must, to do the job they’re designed to do, be standardized. This means that the students must be able to perform a task in a particular way. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, teaching to the test “produces an atmosphere of student passivity and teacher routinization” (Nussbaum, 2016, p. 134). The test cannot be flexible enough to accommodate students who understand two-dimensional drawings of tessellations or tessellations as they appear in stacked wood. Teaching to the test emphasizes first-order thinking over higherorder skill building, excluding things like curiosity, creativity, and other virtues. Further, teaching to the test is not serving the U.S. particularly well. In addition to the harms faced by individual students, particularly those in historically failing schools, the United States is not performing well on international comparisons. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment data from 2015, the U.S. is ranked 38th out of 71 countries for math performance, and 24th in science (Desilver, 2017). This, despite the focus of NCLB and ESSA on math. Further, if Martha Nussbaum is correct, by teaching to the test, we are producing students who lack the creativity and higher-order thinking necessary to be productive members of society or well-rounded and participating members of democracy (Nussbaum, 2016). Beyond this, I contend that students who are taught to the test are discouraged from knowing when and how to manifest their epistemic virtues in school. Nonetheless, they may (and I believe likely do) still display epistemic virtues in many parts of their lives – they simply don’t seem to know that school is a place where these virtues apply. This is why the claim of this chapter is not merely that young people lack phronesis – this would not be surprising given that phronesis is learned through experience and young people necessarily lack experience. Instead, the claim of this chapter is that contemporary schooling in the U.S. actively discourages students from developing phronesis. Teaching in a narrow, rote, test-based way gives students the impression that epistemic work is matter of regurgitating the teacher-/test-sanctioned answer. Many students don’t realize that educational contexts are appropriate for curiosity, humility, and other epistemic virtues because in their test-based experience, that development is neither recognized nor rewarded. For students who are particularly savvy or reflexive, the lack of reward might be interrupting their development of phronesis at a slightly different stage. They might have some idea that creativity or conviction could be helpful in an educational context, but nonetheless take what might be called the “safe” or “conservative” route, instead. Consider Jennifer, who is a friend and classmate of Jamie’s.

Teaching to the test 235 Jennifer and Jamie attend the same church, Jennifer also participates in the lively biblical debates, and Jennifer is also enrolled in Jamie’s political science class. She begins to grapple with the content presented in class, attempting to assimilate it with her views where she can and come up with objections otherwise. However, like Jamie, Jennifer never raises her hand to voice her objections. She expresses no dissent in class, and so has no practice doing so. She knows from her educational background that regurgitation of content is what it takes to get a good grade, so that’s what she does. Rather than take social, educational, and epistemic risks, she plays it safe and dutifully repeats what she’s memorized. She falls short of phronesis because she does not recognize the value of engaging her nascent virtues in this educational context. If I’m right, then we might usefully understand contemporary schooling in the U.S. as epistemically corrupting. Ian James Kidd introduces a notion of epistemic corruption as it relates to epistemic vices and virtues especially in the educational context (Kidd, 2019). I will spend the remainder of this section extending Kidd’s notion of epistemic corruption to cover cases wherein phronesis is discouraged. According to Kidd, a set of practices (i.e. an educational context or set of testimonial norms) is epistemically corrupting insofar as it fails to promote epistemic attainments. These practices can involve either active corruption, or passive corruption, or both. Active corruption encourages agents to develop epistemic vices. This might involve a set of practices that encourages dogmatism, or arrogance. Passive corruption, on the other hand, fails to encourage or enable epistemic virtues (Kidd, n.d.). And Kidd is clear that educational contexts often offer sets of epistemically corrupting practices. I think that Kidd is correct that contemporary schooling can be corrupting in these ways. A student might be encouraged to be dogmatic by attending a school that rewards hardheaded conviction in one’s beliefs despite the evidence. A student might also be discouraged from developing curiosity if, for example, her teacher scolds her for asking too many questions. Kidd’s work helpfully highlights the ways in which formal education can keep people from developing the virtues, or can encourage epistemic viciousness I want to suggest, however, that a set of practices might be neutral with regard to virtues and vices, but nonetheless discourage the kind of accurate perception and experiential reflection required for someone to develop phronesis. Certainly, active corruption is not necessary for a set of practices to discourage phronesis. Some schools might encourage vicious behavior, but they need not in order to discourage students from developing phronesis. On the view I’m defending, an agent might be able to enact the virtues in some contexts, but fail to do so in their formal education. And I think this is largely friendly to Kidd’s view; as Kidd himself notes, epistemic corruption “does not, of course, imply that students are thereby debarred from cultivating their virtues, since education is only one place where they can do that” (Kidd, 2015). However, if educational contexts themselves are neither encouraging vice, nor discouraging virtue (as virtues are being developed), yet they are epistemically corrupting, they must be doing so in a different way. I suggest that this is by way of discouraging epistemic phronesis.

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As the cases of Sarah and Alex and Jamie and Jennifer show, even if students are able to develop their virtues in other places, they are not always able to bring those virtues to bear in educational contexts. Contemporary education discourages them from doing so. The mistake that formal education is making, in all of these cases, is cordoning off educational contexts from the rest of students’ epistemic lives. The message is that while perhaps in the streets, or in the fellowship hall, or online, certain virtues are called for, this is not the place for that. In here – that is, in school – we take tests, we memorize answer sets, and we solve the problems in these and only these ways. Contemporary schooling, then, may be actively corrupting, it may be passively corrupting (in Kidd’s senses), and it might also be corrupting in an additional way: it might prevent the development and exercise of phronesis.

12.4 Future work In this section I will sketch some avenues for future work. I will restrict myself to work at the intersection of philosophy and educational practice, though this work clearly suggests political, curricular, and policy projects as well. Philosophers who are convinced by at least some of what I’ve said above might consider these subsequent projects. First, there is important work already in progress on educating for the virtues. Heather Battaly is using virtue epistemology to make practical suggestions to educators (Battaly, 2006). Lani Watson has laid out the value of educating for virtues like curiosity and good questioning (Watson, 2018). These are projects in virtue epistemology as it applies to education in a more or less concrete way. I suggest adding to that work some careful thinking about what educating for phronesis would look like. Some work has begun on this already (Noel, 1999). Because phronesis is developed by experience, this work could be especially rich and important in fixing educational practice. If I’m right in the above then our current educational system, at least in the U.S., actively works against students developing phronesis. This future project would, in part, be an attempt to sort out how to rectify that. Second, identifying the relevant epistemic phronimos. What does an epistemic phronimos look like? And how could we identify one? Are there sensitivities to practices and principles that are specific to formal educational contexts? Or trackable ways that epistemic principles are manifested in formal education? The phronimos, for Aristotle, is an important measure of virtuousness. The golden virtuous mean between vices is not the sort of thing that can be discovered a priori. However, we can discover it if we can know what the phronimos would do. It would be useful, then, to be able to identify people with epistemic phronesis. Maria Silvia Vaccarezza and Michel Croce have relevant work on moral exemplars, building from the work of Zagzebski (Croce & Silvia Vaccarezza, 2017). It would be of interest to investigate the ways their account would need to be adjusted to discover epistemic exemplars. Perhaps these would be good teachers. Perhaps students could learn from their experience. Perhaps, however,

Teaching to the test 237 these would be exemplars from outside of education. After all, if we retain our educational commitment to teaching to the test, students will have to continue to look outside of formal education to develop their virtues and their phronesis. The question, then, would be translating those epistemic practices into legibility and usefulness in formal schooling contexts. Finally and relatedly, there is work to be done picking up and developing Zagzebski’s idea that well-functioning social groups are instrumental for good epistemic agency. Recall that according to Zagzebski, part of the process of forming a belief involves participating in a social network of beliefs. If this is right, and if, as I contend, this participating is also instrumental for phronesis, then there is an interesting intersection between questions in social epistemology and questions in virtue epistemology. What kinds of social networks help us to develop phronesis? What kinds of social networks do epistemic exemplars enjoy? These, and the above, are the sorts of theoretical questions we might ask, given that epistemic phronesis is necessary for deploying the virtues.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Ian James Kidd for pointing this out. Kidd’s work on epistemically corrupting environments is relevant here and throughout. I elaborate on points related to the sensitivity requirement in my as yet unpublished work on epistemic vulnerability. 2 This is, in some relevant ways, the dual of what Kidd, in this volume, calls propagation. For Kidd, a person’s character can become increasingly more vicious as previously localized vices spread to “affect the range of a subject’s character” (Kidd 2020) A phronimos’ virtues have affected the range of that subject’s character so the virtues can be called upon when it is proper to do so. 3 At least insofar as we count higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills as among our learning goals.

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Duffy, M., Giordano, V. A., Farrell, J. B., Paneque, O. M., & Crump, G. B. (2009). No Child Left Behind: Values and research issues in high‐stakes assessments. Counseling and Values, 53(1), 53–66. Herman, J. L. (1992). What research tells us about good assessment. Educational Leadership, 49(8), 74–78. Hursh, D. (2007). Exacerbating inequality: The failed promise of the No Child Left Behind Act. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(3), 295–308. Hursthouse, R., & Pettigrove, G. (2018). Virtue ethics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/ethics -virtue/ Accessed 18 September, 2020 Jennings, J., & Rentner, D. S. (2006). Ten big effects of the no child left behind act on public schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 88(2), 110–113. Kidd, I. J. (2015). Educating for intellectual humility. In J. Baehr (Ed.), Intellectual Virtues and Education (pp. 54–70). New York: Routledge. Kidd, I. J. (2017). Capital epistemic vices, Social Epistemology Reply and Review Collectie 8(8), 11–16. Kidd, I. J. (2019). Epistemic corruption and education. Episteme, 16(2), 220–235. Kidd, I. J. (n.d.). Epistemic corruption and social oppression. In I. J. Kidd, Q. Cassam, & H. Battaly (Eds.), Vice Epistemology. London: Routledge. McCarthey, S. J. (2008). The impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers’ writing instruction. Written Communication, 25(4), 462–505. McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noel, J. (1999). On the varieties of phronesis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 31(3), 273–289. Nussbaum, M. C. (2016). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities-Updated Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rentner, D. S., Kober, N., & Frizzell, M. (2017). Planning for Progress: States Reflect on Year One Implementation of ESSA. Center on Education Policy. https://files.eric.ed.gov /fulltext/ED583013.pdf Rushton, S., & Juola-Rushton, A. (2008). Classroom learning environment, brain research and the no child left behind initiative: 6 years later. Early Childhood Education Journal, 36(1), 87. Sosa, E. (1980). The raft and the pyramid: Coherence versus foundations in the theory of knowledge. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5(1), 3–26. Volante, L. (2004). Teaching to the test: What every educator and policy-maker should know. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy 35. https://cjc-rcc .ucalgary.ca/index.php/cjeap/article/view/42715 Watson, L. (2015). What is inquisitiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly, 52(3), 273–287. Watson, L. (2018). Educating for good questioning: A tool for intellectual virtues education. Acta Analytica, 33(3), 353–370. Zagzebski, L. T. (1996). Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zohar, A., & Dori, Y. J. (2003). Higher order thinking skills and low-achieving students: Are they mutually exclusive? The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(2), 145–181.

13 Vices of questioning in public discourse Lani Watson

Questioning is ubiquitous and habitual in our daily lives. We ask questions all the time, often without reflecting consciously on the practice. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t, and often we don’t notice the difference. Questions are also a familiar feature of public discourse, and here the difference between good and bad questioning can have important and sometimes damaging effects: a leading question that influences the results of a referendum, a loaded question that forces a prejudicial response in public debate, the aggressive or insensitive questioning of journalists hungry for a story. In this chapter I investigate what makes questioning bad (Section 13.1) then offer a taxonomy of bad questioning practices (Section 13.2). Drawing on examples of questioning in contemporary politics, I go on to discuss the nature and impact of bad questioning in the public sphere (Section 13.3). I argue that bad questioning is an intellectual failing often expressed in intellectual vices such as negligence, closed-mindedness and arrogance (Section 13.4). As such, bad questioning in the public sphere degrades the professional character of, for example, journalists and politicians and undermines the wider role that they play in our epistemic communities. I conclude that greater attention should be paid to questioning practices in public and political forums in order to check and maintain the epistemic and characterological integrity of key social institutions (Section 13.5).

13.1 What is bad questioning? Most of us have some intuitive grasp of what bad questioning looks like. We know that asking a toddler for directions to the train station, or typing ‘where are my keys’ into Google, is probably not the best way to get the information we are after. But what exactly is it that makes questioning like this bad? In order to answer this, it will be instructive first of all, to take a look at what makes questioning good. This will shed light on the many ways in which one can fail to be a good questioner. Many (although not all) of these lead to bad questioning. I will draw on an analysis of good questioning that I have provided in more detail elsewhere (Watson 2018). As a starting point, I take questioning to be essentially a form of information-elicitation. When one engages in questioning, whether good or bad, one is typically in the business of trying to find things out. This is not, of course,

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the only reason we ask questions, but I take it to be the defining function of the practice. A question is a question in virtue of its information-eliciting function. Put another way, a question is an information-eliciting tool. This is so, even if we sometimes, perhaps often, use the tool for some other reason. We may ask a question in order to be polite, to show compassion or to humiliate someone. In each case, the question is an information-eliciting tool used to achieve a further goal. Any tool can be used to greater or lesser effect. In order to be a good questioner, one must use the tool, that is, engage in the activity of eliciting information, skilfully. This elevates good questioning above mere questioning in two ways. In cases of good questioning we do not simply want to elicit information, rather we want to (1) competently elicit information that is (2) worth having. What exactly does this mean? Starting with competence, our efforts to elicit information must not overly rely on acquiring information by luck or chance, even if those do, in certain cases, enable one to successfully acquire information. Conversely, while successfully eliciting information requires that one acquire that information, competently eliciting information does not; one can act competently in order to elicit information even if one is unsuccessful in actually acquiring it. The good questioner will do just this; she will act competently in order to elicit information. Good questioning also requires that the information one elicits is worthwhile. When we engage in good questioning we do not merely want to elicit any information, however competently, but to elicit information that is worthwhile, relevant or significant in some sense; information that is worth having. This requires one to exercise judgement about what information one elicits. The good questioner will avoid eliciting trivial or disvaluable information, as well as the large amount of irrelevant or insignificant information that is available to her. As such, the good questioner acts competently in order to elicit worthwhile information. These distinct aspects of good questioning can be approximately aligned with the content and the performance of a question. The content of a question refers to the information being sought. In other words, the content is what the question asks, its subject matter. If one asks ‘what is the time?’, the content of the question is information about the time. The good questioner must decide what to ask and the content of her question must be worthwhile information. The performance of a question refers to the manner in which it is asked. In other words, the performance is how, when and where a question is asked, as well as whom it is asked of. One may ask abruptly, forcefully, politely or in Spanish. One may ask in the morning or just before the meeting. One may ask at the bus stop or on live television. One may ask an adult or a child or a search engine. These are all aspects of the performance of a question. The good questioner must decide how, when, where and whom to ask and, in doing so, put herself in a position where she is most likely to get the information she is after. That is what it means to act competently in the case of good questioning. A good questioner acts competently in order to elicit worthwhile information by determining what, how, when, where and whom to ask. In other words, she asks the right thing, of the right source, at the right time and place, in the right way. Clearly, there is more that can be said about what

Vices of questioning in public discourse 241 makes questioning good. My aim has been to lay the groundwork for our present focus; what makes questioning bad? The analysis of good questioning provides an insight into bad questioning. Simply put, the bad questioner falls short on one or more of the aspects of good questioning; she asks the wrong thing, or the wrong source, or she asks at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or in the wrong way. Of course, she may do more than one of these things simultaneously. It is easier to be a bad questioner than a good one. Good questioning is relatively hard and can go wrong in a multitude of ways. When it does, it often amounts to bad questioning. As such, there are two broadly distinct ways in which bad questioning can arise. Either the content of the question is not worthwhile, and so the questioner fails to identify what she should ask, or the performance (asking) of the question is not competent, and so the questioner fails to identify how, when, where and/or whom she should ask. Bad questioning is information-elicitation gone awry in one of these ways. That is not to say that the bad questioner always fails to get the information she is after. Nonetheless, being a bad questioner will, more often than not, impede epistemic progress. This explains why asking a toddler for directions to the train station amounts to bad questioning. Assuming that one actually wants to get to the train station, asking a toddler is unlikely to elicit the relevant information: one is asking the right thing of the wrong person. Likewise, one is almost certainly not going to find one’s keys by typing ‘where are my keys’ into Google (unless they happen to be next to the keyboard). Again, one is asking the right thing but consulting the wrong source. If, instead of finding one’s keys, one actually wants to know what the capital of Eritrea is, then typing ‘where are my keys’ into Google is bad questioning of a different sort; one is asking the right source, the wrong thing. Such examples multiply easily. Significantly, note that what makes this questioning bad is the impact that it has on the questioner’s epistemic progress. Bad questioning tends to make it less likely that one will get the worthwhile information one needs or wants. Questioning is bad insofar as it prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information, hence my earlier claim that a question is a question in virtue of its information-eliciting function, that is, the defining function of the practice. Good questioning requires the questioner to elicit worthwhile information competently. Bad questioning is questioning that prevents or impedes this, for one or more of the reasons above. This allows for questions that fail to elicit worthwhile information for some other reason. One can ask a good question which fails to elicit any information at all. Imagine, for example, that the person one asks for directions to the train station has taken a vow of silence, of which one was not and could not reasonably have been, aware. One may still be engaging in good questioning whilst failing to find out where the train station is. Precisely put, a question is not bad because it prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information. Rather, a question is bad if it prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information because the questioner has asked the wrong thing, or the wrong source, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or in the wrong way.

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Questioning that prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information, for one or more of these reasons, is bad questioning qua questioning. Contrast this with the many ways in which questioning can be bad according to some other standard. There is, for example, an important sense in which a question can be morally bad. Indeed, the cases I discuss below have a distinctly moral and/or political dimension. Without diminishing the significance of this dimension, I want to show how the moral and/or political dimensions of questioning can themselves prevent or impede a questioner from eliciting worthwhile information. Questioning that is morally bad can (and often will) be bad questioning qua questioning. What makes a question bad qua question is the manner in which it prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information and so epistemic progress more generally. This helps to illuminate the relationship between bad questioning and intellectual vice. Bad questioning is not an intellectual vice itself, just as good questioning is not an intellectual virtue. Rather, good questioning is an intellectual skill found in the exercise of many of the intellectual virtues including, for example, inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, intellectual humility and intellectual courage (Watson 2018). In much the same way, bad questioning is an intellectual failing found in the exercise of many of the intellectual vices including, for example, carelessness, dogmatism, prejudice, arrogance, closed-mindedness and negligence. Insofar as the intellectual vices ‘impede effective and responsible inquiry’ (Cassam 2016), bad questioning is a mechanism of intellectual vice. I will explore this relationship further in Section 13.4. Naturally, the above analysis of bad questioning is oversimplified. Questioning is a complex practice and determining what makes one good or bad at it is correspondingly complex. Simplified accounts of both good and bad questioning are required in order to allow for analysis at a useful level of generality. That being said, much of our intuitive grasp of bad questioning is captured by these accounts. The accounts, for example, are sensitive to variations in context: the good questioner must be able to make context-sensitive judgments about when, where and whom to ask. The bad questioner may fail to do so in any number of different ways. There is, likewise, nothing in the account of good questioning that suggests there is only one way to be a good questioner. There may be many equally viable sources of information in any given instance, or many equally worthwhile things to find out. Thus, while good questioning is relatively hard compared to bad questioning, given the number of ways in which one can fall short, it is not necessarily hard in and of itself, given the number of ways in which one can be a good questioner and the many opportunities one has for practising the skill. Good questioning can be as simple as asking a person with a watch, ‘what is the time?’ Furthermore, my intention is not to draw a hard line between good and bad questioning; both must surely come in degrees. If one types ‘where are my keys’ into Google when one actually wants to know what the capital of Eritrea is, one is clearly going wrong. But this is an unlikely and outlandish example. Subtly and more plausibly one may want to know which South American countries border Eritrea and so type this into Google. Strictly speaking, one has asked the wrong

Vices of questioning in public discourse 243 question – Eritrea is a country in northeast Africa. Does this amount to bad questioning? In fact, when one types ‘which South American countries border Eritrea’ into Google, the search engine provides the following information, without judgment: Eritrea is located in the Horn of Africa and is bordered on the northeast and east by the Red Sea, on the west and northwest by Sudan, on the south by Ethiopia, and on the southeast by Djibouti. One finds out both that Eritrea is in Africa and which countries border it. There is a sense in which one has asked the wrong question in order to find this out. But it’s not clear that one’s epistemic progress was prevented or impeded by doing so, especially given the extraordinary power of the search engine. Should we therefore say that this amounts to good questioning? That doesn’t seem clear-cut either. Technically speaking, one has found out information in response to a question one didn’t even ask. Ultimately, this question is probably somewhere in the middle; neither particularly bad nor particularly good. That kind of result should be expected. Again, since questioning is a complex practice, the evaluation of questions on a case-by-case basis will be correspondingly complex. In fact, I think we can expect many cases to be ambiguous in this way. My aim is not to carve questioning up into two unambiguous evaluative categories – the good and the bad – but to provide a simplified tool for analysing questions and questioning in complex real-world settings. With that in mind, let’s move on to the taxonomy of bad questioning.

13.2 A taxonomy of bad questioning Bad questioning is questioning that prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information because the questioner has asked either the wrong thing, or in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, or place, or the wrong source. This tells us what bad questioning is. In order to understand how bad questioning operates in practice, it will be useful to examine different types of bad questions as they arise in everyday life. The taxonomy presented in this section provides an overview – albeit an incomplete one for there are surely bad question types that are not accounted for and can be added. Nonetheless, the taxonomy covers a wide range of question types, many of which will be familiar to the reader and, given that the study of bad questioning is in its infancy, this will serve as a good starting point. I provide summaries in Figure 13.1 and a more detailed explication for the more technical question types follows. I also discuss the anomalous place of rhetorical questions in the taxonomy. Excepting this anomaly, the question types are broadly aligned with either the content or the performance dimension of questioning. If a question type is aligned with the content dimension, then asking a question like this may prevent or impede the questioner from eliciting worthwhile information. If a question type is aligned with the performance dimension, then asking a question like this may prevent or impede the questioner from eliciting that information competently. This is not an exact science. Often bad questioning will involve falling short in both dimensions

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and they will regularly act together. A person’s judgments about whom to ask, for example, will often be influenced by what they are trying to find out, and so on. Aligning the different question types with these dimensions is nonetheless useful for the purposes of identifying and diagnosing bad questioning and, in turn, identifying the role that bad questioning plays in intellectual vice. Note also that not all of these practices will always amount to bad questioning. In fact, arguably none of them will always amount to bad questioning. Whether they do will depend on whether they prevent or impede the elicitation of worthwhile information for one of the five reasons discussed in Section 13.1. Indeed, open and closed questions, in particular, will often amount to good questioning and both have been advocated by education theorists and practitioners (e.g. Dillon 1988; Gershon 2013; Worley 2019). On the other hand, one might think that aggressive or insensitive questions are always bad but, again, this will depend on whether or not they always prevent or impede the elicitation of worthwhile information, which seems unlikely. Imagine an aggressive question asked in order to reveal the location of a hidden bomb. Similarly, not all of these bad questioning practices amount to intellectually vicious behaviour and, as we will see in Section 13.4, bad questioning is not necessary for the expression of intellectual vice. Nonetheless, understanding different types of bad questioning will allow for a more detailed analysis of its relationship to intellectually vicious behaviour in the public sphere. The purpose of the taxonomy is to shed light on familiar question types that can, and often do, amount to bad questioning qua questioning. This will allow us to better evaluate questions, determine where they can and do go wrong and, ultimately, identify what is required in order to ask better questions, in our personal interactions and in public discourse, and so to diminish intellectual vice. Many of the question types in this taxonomy need little explication. Understanding what it means to misdirect a question, for example – to ask the wrong person or source – is relatively easy, even if identifying when or why a question is misdirected will not always be straightforward. Others require further explication. Absolute questions are questions that contain absolutes such as ‘always’, and ‘ever’, for example, ‘Do you ever use public transport?’, ‘Do you always vote Labour?’ Absolute questions can be especially problematic when employed in surveys and polls because they often dramatically reduce the list of plausible answers and consequently make responses harder to interpret or less useful. Likewise, compound questions can be problematic in polls. Compound questions are questions that ask more than one thing but limit the respondent’s options so that they cannot, or are less likely to, provide all of the relevant information. Consider the question, ‘How satisfied are you with the public transport and services in your area?’ It is not clear how to answer this question if one is very satisfied with the public transport but less satisfied with the services. Compound questions can be used to deliberately confuse the respondent or manipulate her answer. In this way, they are related to complex questions. Complex questions are questions that contain a presupposition that is not explicitly stated such as, ‘Do you vote Labour or Conservative?’ (The presupposition

Vices of questioning in public discourse 245

BAD QUESTIONING CONTENT

PERFORMANCE

Ques˜oner fails to iden˜fy WHAT to ask

Ques˜oner fails to iden˜fy HOW, WHEN, WHERE, or WHO to ask

ABSOLUTE

Questions that contain absolutes.

AGGRESSIVE

Questions asked in an aggressive manner.

CLOSED

Questions that require a yes or no

CONVOLUTED

answer. COMPLEX

Questions that obscure a

(AKA TRICK)

presupposition.

COMPOUND

Questions that ask more than one

follow. DISTRACTING

Questions that seek out

INEPT

LOADED

MISGUIDED

Questions biased in favour of an

INSENSITIVE

MISDIRECTED

Questions asked of the wrong

answer.

source.

Questions that contain a contentious MISPLACED

Questions asked in the wrong

presupposition.

place.

Questions that seek out irrelevant

MISTIMED

Questions asked at the wrong time.

Questions that require more than a yes or no.

SLIPPERY

Questions asked in an insensitive manner.

information. OPEN

Questions asked through an unsuitable medium.

inappropriate information. LEADING

Questions that contain distracting information.

thing. INAPPROPRIATE

Questions that are difficult to

Questions that change the

‘Rhetorical ques˜ons’: Interrogaves that do not aim at elicing informaon.

information being sought.

Figure 13.1 An incomplete taxonomy of bad questioning

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being that the respondent votes for one or the other.) Complex questions are often referred to as ‘trick questions’ because they can be used to trick a respondent into accepting a presupposition that they wouldn’t accept if it were stated explicitly. Often the presupposition is not immediately obvious, hence the ‘trick’. Even when the presupposition is obvious, complex questions can be used to force the respondent into a difficult dialogical position as when, for example, the prosecutor asks the defendant, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ The respondent is forced either to accept the presupposition (that she used to beat her wife) or refuse to answer the question (which may be incriminating in itself). Complex and compound questions can both give rise to objections in court. If such an objection is sustained, the question must be withdrawn and asked in a series of separate questions so as to avoid confusing the respondent or tricking them into an unintentional admission or commitment hidden in an obscured presupposition. When used in this way, complex questions are closely related to loaded questions. Loaded questions are questions that contain a contentious presupposition. The question ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ is both complex and loaded because it contains a presupposition that is not explicitly stated (that the defendant used to beat her wife) and that presupposition is contentious (whether the defendant did indeed beat her wife is, let us assume, one of the accusations at issue in the trial). Loaded questions are in turn closely related to leading questions. Leading questions are questions that encourage the respondent to answer in a particular way. In a trial or deposition loaded or leading questions can also give rise to objections from the opposing party, as when one hears in legal dramas that ‘the defence is leading the witness’. If such an objection is sustained, the question must be withdrawn. As with the other question types, however, not all leading questions are bad. Indeed, they are a staple of good parenting as when a mother encourages her toddler to consume more fruit by asking ‘Do you want a delicious apple as a special treat?’ Nonetheless, all of these forms of questioning can be dangerous and harmful when employed in certain contexts or with intellectually vicious motivations. It is also worth commenting on inept, inappropriate and misguided questions. Inept questions are questions asked through an unsuitable medium. This could mean asking a question in the wrong language, using the wrong technology or employing the wrong means of communication. Inappropriate questions are questions that seek out inappropriate information. By inappropriate I mean to capture something quite broad: in general, information that it is in some sense not appropriate for the questioner to seek to possess. This could mean asking for private or sensitive information, asking for legally redacted information or asking for information that is harmful in some way. What exactly makes information inappropriate is a more complex issue than I can address here, involving underlying and unresolved questions concerning the nature of epistemic value (Schmitt and Lahroodi 2008; Brady 2009; Haddock, Millar and Pritchard 2009) and the virtue of epistemic temperance (Inman 2015). Nonetheless, if we can make sense of the idea that there is some information that it is not appropriate for a person to seek to possess, then we can make sense of inappropriate questions.

Vices of questioning in public discourse 247 Misguided questions are questions that seek out irrelevant (as opposed to inappropriate) information. By irrelevant I, again, mean to capture something quite broad: in general, information that is not relevant to the questioner’s epistemic goals. This could mean, for example, asking what colour shirt the leader of a political party is wearing in order to decide whether or not to vote for them or asking what age a woman is in order to decide whether or not she is a suitable candidate for a job. What exactly makes information irrelevant again involves deeper questions concerning, for example, the nature of relevance (Schaffer 2001) and the virtues and/or vices of open- and closed-mindedness (Riggs 2010; Battaly 2018). Nonetheless, if we can make sense of the idea that there is some information that is not relevant to a person’s epistemic goals, then we can make sense of misguided questions. We now have some sense of the nature and range of the bad questioning practices represented by the taxonomy. Before proceeding it is also worth noting the anomalous position of rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are anomalous because they are not properly questions in the sense that they are not defined by an information-eliciting function. Indeed, they are defined precisely by the absence of this function. Rhetorical questions are ‘questions’ – or more accurately, interrogative sentences – that do not seek to elicit information. They can nonetheless be deployed in public discourse for a variety of unscrupulous reasons. Their origins in the ancient practice of political rhetoric speak to their significance as a political speech act. Despite this and their interrogative form, however, rhetorical questions cannot qualify as either good or bad questions qua questions, given that they are not defined by the function of information-elicitation.1

13.3 Bad questioning in public discourse What does bad questioning look like in public discourse and what impact does it have? In this section, I present real-world examples of bad questioning in the public sphere to illustrate the taxonomy and highlight the negative impact that bad questioning has in contemporary political life. There is not space to cover all of the question types listed in the taxonomy, nor would it be possible to provide a truly representative sample from the many examples available in recent politics. The examples have been selected to demonstrate the significance of questions and questioning for the preservation or degradation of public discourse and of the epistemic environments in which that discourse is conducted. I begin by examining referendum questions to demonstrate the impact of good and bad questions in democratic politics and then move on to consider a recent case of bad questioning. The latter will bring us to a more detailed discussion of the relationship between bad questioning and intellectual vice in public discourse. 13.3.1 Scottish Independence referendum and Brexit One of the most obvious ways to demonstrate the significance of good and bad questions in political life is by examining the formation of referendum

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questions. Two recent examples in the UK bear witness to this: firstly, the Scottish Independence referendum, held on 18 September 2014, and secondly, the UK referendum on EU membership, held on 23 June 2016, better known as Brexit. In both cases the referendum question that was initially proposed was reformulated after consultation and question-testing by the UK Electoral Commission, an independent body set up to regulate election finance and standards.2 The Electoral Commission guidelines state: A referendum question should present the options clearly, simply and neutrally. So it should: be easy to understand, be to the point, be unambiguous, avoid encouraging voters to consider one response more favourably than another, avoid misleading voters.3 Both the Scottish Independence and Brexit referendum questions were assessed according to these guidelines. In the first case, the initial question proposed by the Scottish National Party (SNP) read: ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ The Electoral Commission report cites public opinion research and consultations with political party members in the Scottish Parliament, academics and lawyers, as well as groups such as Age Scotland, Dyslexia Scotland and Outside the Box (a charity for people with learning disabilities). The report concluded that the initial question should be reworded. Issues with the question focused primarily on the use of the phrase ‘Do you agree…’. The Electoral Commission stated: In our view, while there is no evidence to suggest that ‘Do you agree…?’ is intended deliberately to encourage voters to consider one answer more favourably than another, the responses we have received demonstrate that ‘Do you agree…?’ can be seen by people as encouraging such a response. 4 As a result, the Scottish referendum question was changed to ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ This question was judged to be more neutral and so less likely to ‘encourage voters to consider one response more favourably than another’, in line with the question guidelines. The same process was carried out by the Electoral Commission with respect to the Brexit referendum question. During this process similar concerns were raised about the neutrality of the initial question, ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’ Specifically, some participants in the consultation process suggested that ‘only specifying the “remain” option in the question could influence voters’.5 While it was acknowledged in the report that the effects of this were probably negligible, the wording of the question was nonetheless changed to reflect this concern. The final referendum question read, ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ One might argue that these small changes in question-wording are insignificant. This argument was made by political science professor Matt Qvortrop in

Vices of questioning in public discourse 249 the report on the Scottish Independence question. Qvortrop provided statistical analyses of 74 referendums on independence or self-government from 1980 to 2011. On this basis he concluded that there was no firm evidence that the initial Scottish referendum question containing ‘Do you agree…’ would create bias. In a 2013 article for the BBC, Qvortrop is quoted as saying, ‘The overall conclusion one can draw if one looks around the world, is that the question itself extremely rarely has an impact on the outcome of the referendum’.6 This conclusion is based on the idea that, at least when it comes to major referendums, people have typically made up their minds in advance of entering the polling booth and minor differences in the wording of the question are unlikely to influence them at that stage. This seems right, but it is worth noting that the wording of a referendum question has an influence beyond voting decisions in the polling booth. In both the cases discussed, the major campaigns on each side of the debate were based on the questions as they were stated, thus, the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns in the Scottish Independence referendum and the ‘Vote Leave’ and ‘Vote Remain’ campaigns in the case of Brexit. It seems plausible that ensuring the neutrality of the questions themselves avoids giving a rhetorical edge to one side or the other in the public debate. Perhaps more importantly, it is worth reiterating that these relatively minor changes were made to questions that already met most of the Electoral Commission standards unequivocally. The question assessments conducted by the commission did not turn bad referendum questions into good ones, they turned good referendum questions into better ones. This is a positive outcome in itself. The significance of good referendum questions is, however, highlighted clearly when one considers the impact of a more noticeably bad one. 13.3.2 New Zealand corporal punishment referendum The New Zealand corporal punishment referendum, held from 31 July to 21 August 2009, was a citizens-initiated referendum concerning the legal status of parental corporal punishment. In it the people of New Zealand were asked to vote on whether parental corporal punishment should be a criminal offence. The referendum was initiated in response to the passing of the so-called ‘anti-smacking’ law in 2007, which removed parental correction as a defence for assault against children. Campaign groups seeking to re-establish this defence gained the requisite public support for a referendum on the issue in which voters were asked, ‘Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?’ Voter turnout was 56.1% and 87.4% of voters answered ‘No’. This result suggests that a majority favoured reinstating the parental correction defence and, in effect, overturning the anti-smacking law. The question is clearly both loaded and leading. It contains a contentious presupposition (that a smack can be part of good parental correction) and is biased in favour of a particular answer (voting ‘Yes’ suggests that one believes good parental correction should be a criminal offence). As such, this is a bad question. Notice that it is not merely bad on moral or political grounds. It bad because it

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prevents the elicitation of worthwhile information. Indeed, this is largely what makes it bad on moral and political grounds. In the case of a referendum, the worthwhile information being sought is information about the views of the public on a particular issue. If the collection of that information is corrupted by bias in the process – in this case by a loaded and leading question – then the information itself will be corrupted. Access to a true representation of public opinion is denied and, as such, information about public opinion is prevented from coming to light. The question was heavily criticised. The then-Prime Minister, John Key, was quoted as having commented that ‘the question is a bit ambiguous and could be read a number of different ways’.7 The Labour Party Leader, Phil Goff, likewise argued, ‘the question implies that if you vote “yes” that you’re in favour of criminal sanctions being taken against reasonable parents – actually nobody believes that’.8 Crucially, no change to the law was made following the referendum despite what would appear to be public support in favour of overturning the anti-smacking law. Whatever one thinks about the issue of parental corporal punishment, this fact is worth pausing to consider; 87.4% of voters ostensibly voted in favour of a change in the law. Yet the result was almost entirely dismissed by the government, prompting anger and public protest in the weeks following the referendum.9 Given the government’s clear and warranted criticism of the question, it is, I think, plausible that the question wording played an important role in the government’s willingness and ability to dismiss the referendum result on the basis that it did not provide a true representation of public opinion. Had the question been less biased, and the result the same, this dismissal would have been less easily justified and a more legitimate cause for public outcry. At the very least, it seems clear that poor question formation led to the perception of a dubious and unreliable referendum result in this case and plausibly to a false representation of public opinion. Bad questions like this can have significant political ramifications, particularly in the context of a referendum where the question plays an important role in representing the issue at stake and is often at the heart of the public debate. This provides a clear example of the impact of bad questions in the public sphere. 13.3.3 Jeremy Paxman 2017 pre-election interviews Referendum questions provide a useful illustration of the significance of good and bad questions in democratic politics. Moving beyond the role of individual questions, however, a different public setting in which questioning plays an important role is in the media. Journalists, news anchors and broadcasters, for example, are regularly tasked with asking important, timely or probing questions in order to uncover truths about issues of societal import for the general public. They are, to some extent, professional questioners. As such, by examining journalistic questioning we can observe the significance, not only of bad individual questions but of bad questioning strategies. The following examples are taken from televised interviews conducted prior to the 2017 UK general election by the well-known British broadcaster, Jeremy Paxman.

Vices of questioning in public discourse 251 Paxman is renowned for his ‘tough-talking’ reputation, particularly deployed in interviews with politicians, and is associated with a distinctive questioning strategy involving sustained repetition of a single question. This strategy is intended to expose evasive interlocutors if they fail to answer and is, in itself, neither good nor bad. Paxman’s deployment of the strategy won him acclaim in his early career, perhaps most notably in a 1997 interview with the then-Home Secretary, Michael Howard, who was asked the same question 12 times by Paxman in a televised interview for Newsnight, which he declined to answer directly. Howard’s failure to answer the question directly was taken by many as an admission of guilt or wrongdoing on his part. Paxman received general public approval for the strategy and continued to build his journalistic reputation on this basis. The same approach 20 years later, however, attracted criticism from those watching Paxman’s live, televised interviews with the leaders of the two major British political parties, Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) and Theresa May (Conservative), 11 days prior to the 2017 UK general election. An excerpt from the first few minutes of the Corbyn interview demonstrates the strategy well: Paxman: ‘You promise in this [Labour Party Manifesto] to renew Trident [UK Nuclear Programme]’ Corbyn: ‘It was a conference decision by the Labour Party and as the leader of the party I accept the democracy of our party and in answer –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Is that morally right?’ Corbyn: ‘– in answer to the questions put earlier I made the point that as Prime Minister I will do all I can to bring about a nuclear free world –’ Paxman: ‘Sure’ Corbyn: ‘– because I’m horrified at the very idea … at the very … horrified at the very idea of a nuclear attack anywhere’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Here you promise to renew … you promise to renew … you promise to renew a nuclear weapon’ Corbyn: ‘It’s there in the –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Is that morally right?’ Corbyn: ‘Listen, it’s there in our manifesto because our conference voted for it. I have to accept that decision –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Do you think that it’s morally right?’ Corbyn: Wait a minute, wait a minute, can I finish? Can I finish? What I want to see … what I want to see –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘I’m asking you perfectly simply, do you think it’s morally right?’ Corbyn: ‘– what I want to see is a nuclear free world. That means – Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Of course, everybody wants to see that.’ Corbyn: ‘Well, I’m not so sure about that … I’m not so sure … I’m not so sure about that –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘But is it morally right if that’s what you … if that’s what you believe, is it morally right to renew a nuclear deterrent?’

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Corbyn: ‘That is the decision that’s been taken. We will work for a nuclear free world. We will work through the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to achieve that. That surely is something well worth doing –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘I note you don’t answer.’ Paxman repeats the question ‘is that morally right?’ – or a version of it – six times during this short exchange. It is a closed question so the only direct answers possible are yes and no. At the end of the exchange Paxman accuses Corbyn of not answering the question despite the fact that Corbyn says, or at least attempts to say, a number of things in response. It is tempting to conclude that Paxman judges Corbyn to have not answered the question because he does not answer it with a yes or no. Technically, perhaps. But is that indicative of an evasive approach to the question on Corbyn’s part or of a faulty questioning strategy on Paxman’s part? I think in this instance it is the latter. We can, for example, ask what would satisfy Paxman that the question had been answered. The most complete version of the question (which is given at the end of the exchange) is this: ‘if that’s what you believe, is it morally right to renew a nuclear deterrent?’ Imagine that, instead of trying to explain his position, Corbyn had answered this question with a simple yes or a no. Would Paxman be satisfied? The question is closed but it is nonetheless a complicated question. It is a question about the moral permissibility and indeed ‘rightness’ of the decision to include a statement in a political party manifesto that has been democratically agreed upon by the party members but with which the leader of the party – to whom the question is addressed – personally disagrees. It is deserving of a more detailed answer than a simple yes or no, something which Paxman surely recognises. His decision to ask a closed rather than open question here looks to be a trap; the question warrants a more detailed response but in trying to offer it, Corbyn is accused of ‘not answering the question’. This is a hallmark of Paxman’s aggressive, closed questioning strategy. We see this questioning strategy in operation throughout the interviews with Corbyn and May. A second excerpt is worth examining, taken from the first few minutes of the May interview: Paxman: ‘Hang on a second … you said in March last year that we would be more secure, more prosperous and more influential, virtually in those words, if we stayed in the European Union and now you want to take us out of it’ May: ‘And I also said that the sky wouldn’t fall in if we left the European Union’ Paxman: ‘So you have changed your mind have you?’ May: ‘We gave, we gave … we gave people the choice –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘You’ve changed your mind?’ May: ‘– we … I’ll answer that in a minute … we gave people the choice, Jeremy, and the British people decided to leave the European Union –’ Paxman: ‘Yes’ May: ‘– and I think it’s important for them to see their politicians delivering on that choice and respecting the will of the people. And what I think’s impor –’

Vices of questioning in public discourse 253 [Applause from audience] Paxman: ‘So you’ve changed your mind?’ May: ‘What I am now doing is delivering –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Have you changed your mind?’ May: ‘– I think there are huge opportunities –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘Have you changed your mind?’ May: ‘Jeremy, I know that you have, err, that you use this tactic and you want me to –’ Paxman: [speaking over] ‘I’m just trying to get an answer, that’s all. You can say yes or no, I haven’t changed my mind, yes, I have changed my mind, say what you like!’ Paxman asks May five times during this short exchange whether she has changed her mind on the issue of Brexit. Here the question is rather simpler than the question posed to Corbyn, and one might think that a simple yes or no would be an adequate and informative answer. May’s refusal to answer with a yes or no, therefore, arguably indicates a degree of evasiveness on her part. It seems fair, however, to say that the viewing public is most probably interested in more than merely knowing whether or not May herself has had a change of heart. Her answer is plausibly an attempt to respond to a more substantive question which holds greater interest for the public and, indeed, she is cut off at one point by spontaneous audience applause. At any rate, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this exchange for present purposes concerns the point at which May attempts to challenge Paxman’s questioning strategy which she describes as a ‘tactic’. Paxman responds by animatedly declaring that he is ‘just trying to get an answer’ and reveals, at the same time, that the only answers he is interested in, or would satisfy the question, are yes and no. Yet he directs May to ‘say what you like’. Given that the only answers he will accept are yes and no this seems insincere at best and, moreover, is hard to align with the fact that he speaks over her relentlessly when this is precisely what she is trying to do. This moment of exposure again suggests that Paxman’s aggressive, closed questioning strategy is deployed as a dialogical trap. Importantly, this questioning strategy is a bad one not because it traps the respondent but because in doing so it prevents or impedes the elicitation of worthwhile information. Remember that these were national television interviews, conducted live, 11 days before the 2017 UK general election, with the leaders of the country’s two main political parties. They were the only such interviews conducted prior to the election and, as such, provided a significant opportunity for voters to learn about Corbyn and May’s political beliefs, positions and policies, in an open, accessible manner. Whatever one thinks about the role that this information plays in the voting decisions of the viewing public, the purpose of the interviews was, at least in part, to help the electorate to make an informed decision about who should govern their country. They are interviews, not spoken political statements, or written manifestos, or any other form of political communication and so are conducted in the form

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of question and answer exchange. The questions are thereby essential to the process and to the goal of helping the public to make an informed decision on polling day. The aggressive, closed questioning strategy deployed by Paxman throughout the interviews proves an impediment to this goal. His pursuit of yes or no answers to complicated, moral questions leaves more substantive responses under-examined or, worse, unsaid. His use of dialogical traps, in place of a genuine pursuit of worthwhile information, renders that information difficult or impossible to access. Moreover, his aggressive manner and, at times, slippery questioning are sources of frustration for the viewing public, as much as they are for Corbyn and May. Indeed, live-tweeting throughout the interviews revealed something of this. A small sample of tweets indicates the flavour of this response: ‘We’ll probably get nuked before Paxman lets someone finish a sentence.’ ‘These debates had a lot of potential. Unfortunately Paxman completely ruined it. I think he tried to be difficult but he just came across as rude.’ ‘Any chance Paxman would shut up long enough to let Jeremy answer a question.’ ‘I’d sack him. Can’t let Corbyn answer. He was a terrible interviewer and he’s biased.’ ‘You should be ashamed of Paxman [@Channel4News]. His questioning and approach is completely unprofessional and unhelpful to the nation when trying to decide.’ Journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson summarised this public response in a Guardian article after the interviews commenting that Paxman’s approach was ‘disrespectful to audience members and viewers who actually wanted to learn something and see the interviewees properly challenged’.10 The approach is predominantly one of bad questioning. A final question from these interviews is worth noting in order to highlight Paxman’s particularly provocative questioning style. Paxman opens the interview with May with the following question: ‘Teresa May, when did you realise that you’d got the wrong answer to the biggest question of our times in politics?’ This is not only the first question of the interview but the very first thing that is said. This question provides a clear example of a complex, loaded question. The logician Douglas Walton (1999) offers a helpful summary of this question type: ‘When did you stop cheating on your income tax returns?’ The question is a when-question, so, in order to give a direct answer, the respondent has to indicate some particular time like, for example, December 2nd, 1976. However, in this case, if the respondent does give such a specific time as answer, then it is clear that he has become committed to having cheated on his income tax returns and, presumably, this is a proposition which generally

Vices of questioning in public discourse 255 he would not be want to concede, or at any rate, would be prejudicial, or not in his interest to concede. (Walton, 1999, p. 379) It is easy to see the similarities between the question Walton uses as a paradigmatic example of a complex, loaded question, and the one asked by Paxman at the start of the May interview. It is a ‘when’ question with a set of contentious presuppositions: (1) that the question to which Paxman is referring is the ‘biggest question of our times in politics’ (whatever that means), (2) that May got the ‘wrong answer’ to that question, and (3) that she has since realised it. It is fair to say that it would not have been in May’s interest to concede any one of these. Just imagine her answering the question with a date! There is something almost textbook about Paxman’s use of this complex, loaded question to open the interview. May’s response is a baffled pause, followed by an attempt to clarify which question Paxman is referring to as ‘the biggest of our times’, followed by a sort of dialogical stumbling into a defence of her actions regarding Brexit (which leads into the excerpt quoted above). It is hard to view this as an informative start to the interview. Perhaps Paxman succeeds in making May look foolish, but the joke is ultimately on the viewing public who get little to no epistemic benefit. The Paxman pre-election interviews are, of course, just one example of bad questioning in the public sphere – albeit an example taken from a noteworthy moment in contemporary British politics. The example is intended to illustrate the broader claim of the chapter, namely, that bad questioning strategies play a significant and potentially damaging role in public discourse. They determine what information is made available and what is left unsaid, as well as influencing how important a topic is taken to be and how deeply it is examined. All of this ultimately plays a role in determining the extent to which the reading, viewing and voting public are informed on issues that matter. Moreover, bad questioning, such as that employed by Paxman, also serves as an expression of intellectual vice in the public sphere. I have described Paxman’s strategy as one of aggressive, closed questioning, revealing the vice-language already in play in cases such as this. We can now examine this relationship in more detail.

13.4 Bad questioning and intellectual vice Bad questioning is a feature of intellectually vicious behaviour. In order to explicate this it is useful once again to return to good questioning and examine its relationship to intellectual virtue. I have argued elsewhere that good questioning is an intellectual skill involved in the exercise of many, if not all, of the intellectual virtues (Watson 2018). What does this mean? Following other authors, I take it that part of what it is to be intellectually virtuous is to possess and exhibit certain intellectual skills (e.g. Zagzebski 1996; Roberts and Wood 2007). Thus, intellectual skills partly constitute intellectual virtues; one cannot be intellectually virtuous without the exercise of intellectual skill. The skill of good questioning is,

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I argue, at least sometimes the intellectual skill which partly constitutes the intellectual virtues of, for example, attentiveness, intellectual autonomy, intellectual courage and intellectual humility (Watson 2018). In addition, I argue that the skill of good questioning is necessary for the exercise of virtuous inquisitiveness (Watson 2015). In other words, good questioning is one way of expressing the intellectual virtues. In much the same way, the intellectual failing of bad questioning is involved in the expression of many, if not all, of the intellectual vices; it at least sometimes partly constitutes intellectual vices such as negligence, arrogance, prejudice, closed-mindedness and dogmatism. Bad questioning is one way of expressing these intellectual vices. That is not to say that bad questioning is necessary for intellectual vice. A person can be closed-minded or negligent, for example, without asking any questions. Nor is bad questioning typically sufficient for intellectual vice. Typing ‘where are my keys’ into Google is bad questioning but it is not intellectually vicious. Nonetheless, in cases such as the Paxman pre-election interviews, bad questioning serves as an expression of intellectual vice. Paxman’s aggressive, closed questioning reveals, for example, a negligent disregard for the pursuit of worthwhile information throughout the interviews. Moreover, his reliance on this strategy and unwillingness or inability to change course despite live, negative feedback is indicative of a degree of arrogance and/or closed-mindedness on his part resulting, as journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson put it, in ‘disrespect’ for the viewing public. Paxman exhibits intellectual vice through bad questioning. This is one (among many) ways of expressing intellectual vice. Notably, Paxman’s reputation as a respected British broadcaster suffered after the interviews, as seen in the Twitter response and in subsequent discussion of the interviews by fellow journalists. More important than the effect that this may or may not have had on Paxman, the presence of intellectual vice in the interviews, expressed through bad questioning, diminished their value to the viewing and voting public. Examples such as this degrade the professional character of journalism more generally and of mainstream media outlets such as the BBC. These outlets represent a central cog in the wheel of democracy, and their degradation in the eyes of the public is a cause for concern. As such, the presence of intellectual vice in the mainstream media and in the wider public sphere raises difficult questions about, for example, the extent to which journalists and politicians can be trusted, the reliability and impartiality of experts and news sources and the accountability of public figures with respect to privileged knowledge and information. To the extent that bad questions and bad questioning strategies serve as an expression of intellectual vice within these social institutions they should be identified and alleviated in order to help check and maintain the epistemic and characterological integrity of key social institutions.

13.5 Concluding thoughts I have offered an analysis of bad questioning (Section 13.1), provided a taxonomy of bad question types (Section 13.2) and illustrated the harms that can and

Vices of questioning in public discourse 257 do arise from bad questioning as an expression of intellectual vice in the public sphere (Sections 13.3 and 13.4). The study of bad questioning is nonetheless in its infancy, and the present chapter is intended to prompt more questions than it answers. We should ask, for example, why bad questioning prevails in public discourse and under what conditions it flourishes. Paxman was, to some extent, exposed for bad questioning in the pre-election interviews, but it is worth remembering that his reputation was largely built on the strategy that he deployed in these interviews, and it seems unlikely that this is the first and only time that it has warranted criticism. It is only by paying attention to the questions, as well as the answers, that bad questioning such as this can be challenged. Furthermore, we should ask what, if anything, can be done to guard against bad questioning, particularly when it expresses intellectual vice in public life. One interesting prospect may lie in examining the regulation of questioning in legal settings such as a courtroom. Here the dangers of bad questioning are, at least to some extent, recognised and legislated for, as noted in Section 13.2. Lawyers are trained and conduct themselves on this basis. No such recognition or regulation of questioning exists in, for example, the mainstream media or politics and yet the dangers are equally live. Are there mechanisms by which journalists conducting interviews or politicians engaging in public debate could be held to the same professional questioning standards as lawyers in a courtroom? If so, how could such standards be implemented and enforced? These are questions that can and should be tackled. By placing a spotlight on questioning practices in public discourse I hope to have drawn attention to a common but often underacknowledged aspect of intellectual conduct and highlighted its relationship to intellectual vice.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Nathan Sheff and Ian James Kidd for detailed comments on drafts of this chapter and to the audience of the Vice Epistemology Conference at the University of Connecticut, 2019. This work was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust [grant number R44476].

Notes 1 The nature, benefits and harms of rhetorical questions will be explored in more detail in future work. 2 Electoral Commission referendum question-testing for the Scottish Independence and UK EU membership referendums: www.electoralcommission.org.uk/our-work/our-r esearch/referendum-question-testing [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 3 Electoral Commission Referendum Question Assessment Guidelines: www.electoralco mmission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/82626/Referendum-Question-guidelines -final.pdf [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 4 Referendum on independence for Scotland: Advice of the Electoral Commission on the proposed Referendum question (pp. 21–22): www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data /assets/pdf_file/0007/153691/Referendum-on-independence-for-Scotland-our-advice -on-referendum-question.pdf [Accessed: 22 March 2019].

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5 Referendum on membership of the European Union: Question testing (p. 9): www.e lectoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/192093/GfK-Report-EU-Refer endum-Question-Testing-2015-WEB.pdf [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 6 www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-20512743 [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 7 ‘Key, Goff won’t vote on smacking referendum’: www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10578819 [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 8 ‘Key, Goff won’t vote on smacking referendum’: www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10578819 [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 9 ‘One arrest as thousands join “March for Democracy”’: www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10610750 [Accessed: 22 March 2019]. 10 ‘When did Paxman go from supreme interviewer to shouty interrupter?’: www.thegua rdian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/30/jeremy-paxman-politician-theresa-may-je remy-corbyn.

References Battaly, Heather. 2018. “Closed-Mindedness and Dogmatism”, Episteme 15(3): 261–282. Brady, Michael. 2009. “Curiosity and the Value of Truth”, in Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar and Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 265–283. Cassam, Quassim. 2016. “Vice Epistemology”, The Monist 99(3): 159–180. Dillon, J. T. 1988. Questioning and Teaching: A Manual of Practice. Oregon: Resource Publications. Gershon, Mike. 2013. How to Use Questioning in the Classroom: The Complete Guide. Published by the author. Haddock, Adrian, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard (eds.). 2009. Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inman, Ross D. 2015. “Epistemic Temperance and the Moral Perils of Intellectual Inquiry”, Philosophia Christi 17(2): 457–472. Riggs, Wayne. 2010. “Open-Mindedness”, in Heather Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 173–188. Roberts, Robert C. and Wood, W. J. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Jonathan. 2001. “Knowledge, Relevant Alternatives and Missed Clues”, Analysis 61(271): 202–208. Schmitt, Frederick F. and Reza Lahroodi. 2008. “The Epistemic Value of Curiosity”, Educational Theory 58(2): 125–148. Walton, Douglas. 1999. “The Fallacy of Many Questions: On the Notions of Complexity, Loadedness and Unfair Entrapment in Interrogative Theory”, Argumentation 13: 379–383. Watson, Lani. 2015. “What is Inquisitiveness?”, American Philosophical Quarterly 52(3): 273–288. Watson, Lani. 2018. “Educating for Good Questioning: A Tool for Intellectual Virtues Education”, Acta Analytica 33(3): 353–370. Worley, Peter. 2019. Questioning: 100 Ideas for Primary Teachers. London: Bloomsbury. Zagzebski, Linda. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures. active ignorance 53–56, 60, 62, 64, 65n22 activism 5, 13, 80, 108; epistemic 10, 108, 120–123, 142n10 aetiological sensitivity 78–80 A Far Cry from Kensington 208 affective dimension 22–23, 27–28, 34n6, 60 akrasia 11, 178–180, 186n21 Alcibiades 3 Alfano, Mark 6, 9–10, 47, 62, 131, 148, 153–154, 159 amelioration 1, 7, 10, 12–13, 49n19, 70–71, 77, 79–80, 121–122, 141 Andreou, Chrisoula 175 anti-social epistemology 6, 13 applied vice epistemology 6, 11 Aristotle 3, 8, 11, 21, 23–24, 28, 33n3, 39, 179, 186n21, 211, 227, 236 Astell, Mary 4, 69 attention 3, 5, 7, 13, 23, 26–27, 31, 33, 42, 58–61, 63, 65n18, 65n20, 65n21, 70, 89–90, 101, 108–110, 114, 116–117, 121, 141, 148, 156, 195, 197, 200, 203, 216, 239, 257 aversive behaviour 61 axiological pluralism 78, 80–81, 83 Axtell, Guy 92 Bacon, Francis 4 Baehr, Jason 5–8, 49n16, 99, 157, 171, 209–210, 213, 228 Baier, Annette 72 Battaly, Heather 5, 7–8, 11, 26, 40–41, 77–79, 82, 92, 98, 129, 143n25, 148, 168, 172, 213, 220, 225, 236, 247 belief-security 148, 151–152, 155, 159–161 Believing Inmates (policy) 111, 115–116

Bias of Crowds model 135–136, 139–140 blame 43, 56, 62, 79–80, 100, 105n8, 144n36, 194, 203–204 blameworthy psychologies 129–130 Bloomfield, Paul 7, 227 Brexit 12, 137, 247–249, 253, 255, 257n2 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 9, 90, 102–104, 249, 256 Buddhism 3, 14n2 Byerly, Meghan 138–140, 143n30 Byerly, Ryan 138–140, 143n30 capital institutional vices 10 Card, Claudia 69 carelessness 25, 29, 31, 200, 242 Cassam, Quassim 5, 7–8, 70, 78–81, 89, 105n1, 105n8, 110–111, 124n2, 126, 128–131, 215, 242 character: critical epistemology 9, 13, 71, 75, 77–78, 80–83; critical theory 13, 77–78, 81–82; epistemic 1–3, 5–6, 9, 11, 13, 55, 64, 65n21, 69–79, 81–83, 100, 112; epistemologies of education 79; intellectual 21, 24, 47, 93, 168–169, 172, 174, 180, 183–184, 216; moral 69, 77; professional 239, 256; trait 3, 5, 8, 11–12, 22, 37, 39–40, 47, 57, 62, 65n15, 66n27, 79, 81–83, 128, 132–133, 168–169, 171–172, 179–180, 190, 192, 202, 213, 228–229; vices 47, 55, 64, 65n21, 131, 183; virtue 5, 174, 180, 184 Charmides 3 climate scientists 8 Code, Lorraine 2, 5 cognitive contact with reality 81, 93, 99–100 collective intentionality 94

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Condorcet Jury Theorem 156 Confucius see Kǒngzı consequentialism 80, 111–112, 114, 189 conspiracies 32, 47–48, 50n37, 97, 159–160, 196–197, 205n6, 205n7 continence 23, 28 Cooper, David E. 77 Cordell, Sean 140 Craig, Edward 42, 44, 50n24 Crerar, Charlie 7, 11, 31–32, 99–100, 173, 215 critical race theory 5 Croce, Michel 75, 236 culpability 62, 100, 124n5 curiosity 21–22, 31, 89, 110, 114, 124n6, 185, 228–229, 233–236 Cynics 1, 4, 76, 91, 220 Daukas, Nancy 13, 75, 81–82 DeYoung, Rebecca 4, 13 diligence 89, 228 Dillon, Robin 12, 69, 71, 75–82, 84 distrust 115, 117–119, 158–159, 205n7 Dotson, Kristie 81, 124 doubt-mongering 54 Douglass, Fredrick 157, 160 Driver, Julia 49n22, 130, 205n3 Du Bois, W.E.B. 83 Eddo-Lodge, Reni 53 education 4, 8, 11–13, 63, 77, 79, 173, 193, 208–212, 215–216, 218–219, 225, 227, 230–237, 244 enkrateia 23, 28 environmental luck 151 epistemic: bubbles 6, 8; confidence 74, 115; environment 11, 26, 73–75, 77, 148, 151, 156–158, 173, 180, 184, 189, 231, 247; exemplars 73, 75, 236–237; functioning 1, 10, 92, 111–118; labour 54; neglect 108–109, 113–116, 118, 120–121, 124n8, 124n10; phronesis 12, 225, 227–230, 232, 235–237; phronimos 12, 236; relationality 113–116, 118– 119; resistance 13, 112, 114, 120–123; safety 11; security 11, 151–152; self-corruption 71; sensibilities 70, 216; situationism 47; well-being 10, 152–153, 157–158, 160 epistemic corruption 9, 12–13, 71–75, 77–79, 81, 83, 112, 116, 119–120, 122, 235; acquisition 60, 72, 78, 129, 189, 191, 198, 200, 203–204; activation 72, 131–132, 142n13; active corruption 71,

235; corruptee 71; corruptors 71–73; intensification 72; passive corruption 71, 235; propagation 72, 237n2; ‘rebranding’ 76; stabilisation 72 epistemic vices: alethic vices 74, 77; apathy 11, 168, 176, 182, 184–185; appetitive vices 74, 77; arrogance 1–4, 6–9, 11, 13, 14n3, 21, 31–32, 40, 43–44, 47–48, 53, 55, 57, 62–64, 66n27, 69–70, 72, 74, 76, 89, 105n10, 110, 114–115, 135, 199–200, 235, 239, 242, 256; capital 10, 109, 111–116, 118–120, 122–123, 124n4, 124n6; classification of 12; collective 1, 4, 10, 13, 103, 105n3, 126, 133, 135–137, 140–141; complacency 11, 57, 64n5, 66n26, 168, 184–185, 186n31, 186n32, 187n32; dismissiveness 33, 196–197; disorganization 137, 140; dogmatism 1–4, 6, 8, 14n3, 21, 33, 37–38, 41, 43, 46, 49n14, 57, 72–74, 76, 142n4, 156–158, 235, 242, 256; epistemic insensibility 1, 5, 8, 77, 220; epistemic insensitivity 11, 111, 189–190, 192–196, 198–202, 204; epistemic intemperance 7; epistemic malevolence 7, 25, 29, 31, 34n9, 82, 99, 157; epistemic self-indulgence 1, 5, 7; esoteric epistemic vices 49n7; excessive credulity 110; folly 11, 168, 184–185; ‘four-dimensional’ account of their structure 22; gullibility 1, 7, 21, 26, 29, 33, 110–111, 115, 129; haughtiness 7; hyper-autonomy 7; incredulity 10, 110, 113–115, 118–119, 121, 123n1, 123n2, 124n2, 124n6, 124n10; incuriosity 31, 110, 114, 124n6; indifference 31, 69, 81, 186n29; inferential inertia 9–10, 101–102, 104, 105n13; intellectual arrogance 7, 9, 13, 21, 31, 55, 57, 62, 64; intellectual laziness 21, 28–31; intellectual recklessness 21, 26; intellectual snobbery 11, 208–215, 219, 221n2; intellectual timidity 7; petty bureaucracy 137, 139; prejudice 32, 39–40, 61, 90, 97, 101, 105n8, 105n13, 117, 119, 137–140, 143n28, 212, 242, 256; procrastinating 11, 167–168, 174–178, 180–181, 184–185, 185n1, 186n19, 186n23; quitting 11, 167–168, 171–174, 181, 183–185, 185n1, 186n9, 186n13, 186n23; racial insensitivity 9, 53, 57, 60–62, 64, 66n26; resignation 11, 168, 184–185, 186n31; servility 7, 70, 74; slacking off 11, 167–168,

Index 181–185, 186n23, 186n24, 186n25, 187n32; stealthy 7, 65n11; testimonial injustice 1, 5, 58, 81, 101, 105n13, 115, 119–120, 123; thinking-vices 99, 105n9, 110, 131; vanity 82–83; venial epistemic vices 109, 111–112, 114, 119; vice of oversensitivity 190; ‘vices of the privileged’ 48, 74; vicious personality traits 110; vicious sensibilities 9, 53, 57, 59, 61, 65n21; wishful thinking 1, 39– 40, 54, 56; see also capital institutional vices; insensitivity epistemic virtues: adjusting 158; competence dimension 22, 26, 33, 35n21; curiosity 21–22, 89, 185, 228–229, 233–236; diligence 89, 228; intellectual humility 1, 7, 13, 21–22, 185, 242, 256; judgment dimension 22–23, 30; motivational dimension 22, 30–31, 33, 35n21; other-regarding 191; perseverance 11, 167–169, 171, 174, 181, 183–185; restructuring 156, 159; sensitivity 4, 11, 58, 69–70, 77–79, 82, 149, 190, 195–196, 200–203, 215, 217–218, 220, 227–228, 237n1; tenacity 76, 228; testimonial justice 89, 119 ethical vices 2–3 ‘ethico-epistemic’ traits and dispositions 81, 115–116 ethos 9, 90–101, 103–104, 105n5 Euthyphro 3 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) 233–234 exemplars 12, 14n2, 73, 75–76, 133, 159, 227, 236–237; of epistemic vice 75–76; of epistemic virtue 75, 98 Facebook 154, 157 fact-checking 96–100 ‘fake news’ 13, 159–160 feminist epistemology 4–5, 75, 83 foundational vice epistemology 21 free-riders 167 Fricker, Miranda 5, 7, 9, 58, 70–71, 81, 89, 91, 105n4, 114, 119, 136–138, 143n23, 143n24, 143n27, 143n28, 144n35, 148, 205n7, 216 frustration 80, 128, 169, 254 Galileo 31–32, 35n25, 100 gender bias 127–129, 134–135, 139 Gilbert, Margaret 93–97, 104, 105n7 Goguen, Stacey 7

261

Goldberg, Sandy 150, 161n3 Gorgias 3 Greco, John 148 group agency 94, 135 Haslanger, Sally 134 hermeneutical justice 89 ‘hidden hand’ mechanisms 10 high fidelity vices 82, 131 Holroyd, Jules 7, 9–10, 61, 126, 129–130, 142n15 Hookway, Christopher 58 Hursthouse, Rosalind 227 ideological explanations 48 ignorance 7, 9, 25, 53–64, 64n1, 64n4, 65n21, 65n22, 66n24, 66n26, 79, 182, 194, 200; loving 55, 57 Implicit Association Test 130 implicit biases 10, 126–134, 136, 140–141, 142n6, 142n8, 142n11, 143n22, 144n37 inquisitiveness 28, 229–230, 242, 256 insensitivity: expertise 11, 190, 192–193; interest 190, 197–198; physiological 190, 198; testimonial 10, 110–111, 122; value 190, 194 Inside/Outside Alliance (IOA) 109, 111, 116–117, 121–122, 124n12 institutional epistemic failure 98, 110 institutional racism 90; see also vice intellectual: actions 28, 168–170, 172–174, 179–180, 184; evaluations 11, 210–212, 217, 220, 221n7; goals 167–179, 181, 183–185, 186n11, 202; merits 211–213, 215, 219–220, 221n1; status 11, 209, 211–220, 221n8 interviews 91, 250–257 ‘invisible hand’ mechanisms 137–141, 144n31 jail 108–111, 113, 115, 117–122 Johnson, Casey 12, 79 ‘joint commitment’ 10, 93–98, 104, 136–137, 139–141, 143n27, 144n35 Kant, Immanuel 152–153, 155 Kawall, Jason 148, 185 Kidd, Ian James 4–5, 7–9, 13, 33n1, 49n5, 49n19, 69, 75, 77–79, 83, 112, 124n4, 141, 144n36, 168, 173, 205n5, 225, 235–236, 237n1, 237n2 King, Nathan 168–169, 171 Kivisto, Sari 13 Kǒngzı 3, 14n1

262

Index

Kornblith, Hilary 38, 49n3 Korsgaard, Christine 153 Lackey, Jennifer 150 Lahroodi, Reza 7, 246 Langton, Rae 97 Lawrence, Stephen 90 Lewis, David 97 liberation 13 liberatory: epistemic virtue 13; vice epistemologies 79 List, Christian 94, 156 Locke, John 4, 45–46, 50n27, 50n29, 50n31 low-fidelity vices 131 Lynch, Michael 8 MacIntosh, Duncan 175, 186n15 MacIntyre, Alasdair 71 Macpherson Report 90 Manson, Neil C. 13, 55 McCain, Matthew 109–110, 114–117, 124n8 Medina, José 5, 7, 9–10, 40, 48, 54, 57, 60, 64, 66n24, 70–71, 73–74, 78–80, 89, 110, 117, 120–122, 135, 165n2 #metoo 53 Michelson, Albert 170–171, 173 Miller, Christian 73 Mills, Charles 54–56, 79 misinformation 54 modal epistemic standings 148–152, 160 Montmarquet, James 5, 22, 32, 148 ‘moral damage’ 69, 71 moral neglect 108 moral vices see virtue ethics moral virtues see virtue ethics Moriarty, Michael 76 Morley, Edward 170–171, 173 Morrison, Toni 171 motivation 8, 24–25, 27, 29–33, 34n5, 34n7, 34n8, 34n11, 35n16, 35n19, 58, 63, 65n9, 70, 81, 111, 114, 120, 139, 156, 159, 171–173, 179–181, 213, 220, 226–227; proximate 213; ultimate 100, 213 motivationalism 11, 21–23, 25–27, 29–33, 34n15, 35n20, 35n21, 35n23, 35n26, 35n27, 57, 59, 65n7, 71–72, 75–77, 81, 91–92, 98–100, 104, 105n6, 213, 215–217, 220 negative epistemic exemplar see exemplar of epistemic vice negligence 10, 116, 136, 138, 140, 142n4, 144n31, 176, 200, 239, 242, 256

networks: -security 148, 152, 154–156, 159–161; social epistemic 149–151, 156, 158–159, 161n3; star-networks 10, 153, 154 New Zealand corporal punishment referendum 249 Nguyen, C. Thi 8 Nicomachean Ethics 3, 227 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 12, 232–234 normative contextualism 78, 81–83, 168 ‘numbness’ 57, 60 Nussbaum, Martha 234 Oblomov 31 obstructivism 40–41, 49n12, 81, 111–112, 114, 116, 120, 128–131, 137, 139 Orwell, George 174, 180, 184; Oceania 180–181, 184 Pascal, Blaise 2 Paul, Herman 13 Paxman, Jeremy 250–257 personal worth 22, 24, 33n2, 35n19 personalist 78 Pettigrove, Glen 227 Pettit, Philip 94 Plato 160 plural subject 93–95 Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile 5, 7, 81 post-truth politics 6 pragmatism 39, 46, 82 ‘predicaments of the oppressed’ 74 ‘predicaments of the privileged’ 74 Priest, Maura 11 Pritchard, Duncan 148–150, 155, 246 Proctor, Robert 76 propaganda 54, 159 questioning/questions: bad 12, 239, 241–244, 245, 247, 249–250, 254– 257; complex 144n36, 244, 245, 246, 254–255; compound 244, 245, 246; good 236, 239–244, 247, 250, 255– 256; inappropriate 245, 246; leading 239, 245, 246, 250; loaded 239, 245, 246, 250, 254–255; misguided 245, 246–247 racism 90, 117; anti- 142n10; aversive 61–62; structural 53, 144n32; see also institutional reliabilism 40, 190–191, 205n2; see also virtue

Index responsibilism 40, 129, 190–191, 205n2; see also virtue responsibility 2, 5, 26, 29, 33, 56, 62, 66n24, 78, 124n5, 136, 142n16, 144n33, 144n36; retention- 78 Riggs, Wayne 156, 247 Roberts, Robert C. 5, 7, 31, 82–83, 255 Rochefoucauld, Duc de La 76 Rooney, Phyllis 75 Russell, Bertrand 169–171 Scottish Independence referendum 12, 247–249, 257n2 Sherman, Benjamin 7 skill 12, 22–23, 25–28, 30, 34n14, 34n15, 35n10, 49n11, 58–60, 92, 138, 159, 171–172, 190–191, 195, 199, 204, 211, 213, 226–231, 233–234, 237n3, 242, 255–256 Slote, Michael 135 Smith, Dame Janet 102–104 snobbery 11, 32, 208–217, 219–220, 221n2, 221n6, 221n12; of motivations 11, 209, 215–216; of sensibilities 11, 209, 216, 219–220 social: institution 70, 73, 82, 239, 256; oppression 6, 69–71, 81; virtue epistemology 13 Sosa, Ernest 5, 148–149, 229 Spelman, Elizabeth 54, 56 Stroud, Sarah 174–175 Sullivan, Emily 9–10, 155, 157, 159 summative 93–94 Tanesini, Alessandra 7, 9, 32–33, 35n24, 35n29, 54, 59, 62, 70, 79, 212–213, 216, 221n8 Tappolet, Christine 175 Taylor, Gabriele 43, 71 ‘teaching to the test’ 232–234, 237 Tessman, Lisa 69, 82 testimonial: credibility 74, 81; smothering 115 testimony 97, 105n12, 114–116, 124n10, 149–153, 156–158, 161n6, 191, 193–194, 205n7, 212 time-wasters 183 tobacco industry 76 trolls 154, 202 trust 10, 54, 113, 115, 117, 156, 158–159, 201, 218 truthfulness 6, 96–97 Tuana, Nancy 54–55

263

Tuomela, Raimo 94–95 Twitter 154, 157, 256 UK referendum on EU membership see Brexit Vaccarezza, Maria Silvia 75, 236 Valian, Virginia 127 vector-relative safety 150, 161n3 vice attributions 39, 42–44, 47, 49n19, 142n6, 144n36 vice ontology 8, 12; conceptualism 38–39, 44–46, 50n31; conceptualist realism 46; realism 38–39, 44–46, 50n26; vicemonism 8, 37, 39; vice-pluralism 8, 37, 39–40, 48n1 vice reduction see amelioration vice-charging 49n19, 140–141 vices: aggressiveness 12, 73, 75, 196, 199–200, 239, 244, 245, 252–256; contempt 69; cruelty 69, 82, 131; dishonesty 28, 76, 199; dismissiveness 33, 43, 128, 196–197, 219; of domination 69; greed 3, 198–199, 204; institutional 9–10, 13, 90, 92, 101, 104, 105n4, 119; interpersonal 192, 200; manipulativeness 199; rudeness 199, 254; selfishness 199; substantive 140; uncharitableness 199–200 vicious ways of thinking see epistemic vices/thinking-vices virtue epistemology: autonomous 6, 10, 27, 54, 160, 201; conservative 6, 230, 234; foundational 5–6, 8, 21 virtues: ethics 6, 58, 229; humility 55, 70, 89, 228–229, 233–234; intellectual autonomy 21, 27, 155, 160, 256; intellectual courage 21, 209–210, 229, 242, 256; intellectual humility 1, 7, 13, 21–22, 185, 242, 256; interpersonal 191–192; monitoring 11, 155–161; -reliabilism 185, 186n22, 229; -responsibilism 185n2, 228, 231; virtues of epistemic justice 89, 119 Virtues of the Mind 5 Volante, Louis 233 Watson, Gary 170 Watson, Lani 12, 225, 229, 236, 239, 242, 255–256 Westacott, Emrys 209–210 whistle-blowers 96–97 white privilege 55–57, 60, 62, 170–171

264

Index

Whitt, Matt 109–110, 117, 120–122 Williams, Bernard 6 Wire, The (TV show) 225 Wollstonecraft, Mary 4, 69 Wonder Boys 170 Wood, W. Jay 5, 7, 31, 82–83

Yom Kippur 42, 47–48 Zagzebski, Linda 5, 26, 39, 75, 81, 93, 98, 105, 148, 228–229, 236–237, 255; see also Virtues of the Mind Zhuāngzǐ 3