Is Open‐mindedness a Moral Virtue?

Is open‐mindedness a moral virtue? Surprisingly, this question has not received much attention from philosophers. In this paper, we fill this lacuna by arguing that there are good grounds for thinking that it is. In particular, we show that the extant account of open‐mindedness as a moral virtue faces an objection that appears to show that exercising the character trait may not be virtuous. To offset this objection, we argue that a much stronger argument can be made for the case that open‐mindedness is a moral virtue by appealing to the notion of moral understanding. Specifically, we provide a new rationale as to why we should exercise open‐mindedness and offer several arguments to allay the concern that doing so can at times cause us to be in an epistemically and morally weaker position.     

Open‐Mindedness as Engagement

Open‐mindedness is an under‐explored topic in virtue epistemology, despite its assumed importance for the field. Questions about it abound and need to be answered. For example, what sort of intellectual activities are central to it? Can one be open‐minded about one's firmly held beliefs? Why should we strive to be open‐minded? This paper aims to shed light on these and other pertinent issues. In particular, it proposes a view that construes open‐mindedness as engagement, that is, a willingness to entertain novel ideas in one's cognitive space and to accord them serious consideration.     

A NEO‐STOIC APPROACH TO EPISTEMIC AGENCY

What is the best model of epistemic agency for virtue epistemology? Insofar as the intellectual and moral virtues are similar, it is desirable to develop models of agency that are similar across the two realms. Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics present a model of the virtues on which the moral and intellectual virtues are unified. The Stoics’ materialism and determinism also help to explain how we can be responsible for our beliefs even when we cannot believe otherwise. In this paper I show how a neo‐Stoic model of epistemic agency can address common objections to treating epistemic and moral agency similarly and allow a robust explanatory role for character in determining our actions and beliefs. The picture of epistemic responsibility that flows from this model also explains why we often deserve credit for our knowledge, while demonstrating that the truth of our beliefs is not something for which we are epistemically responsible.     

Typecasts,Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial injustice is a matter of credibility deficit, not excess. In this article, I argue that this restricted characterization of testimonial injustice is too narrow. I introduce a type of identity‐prejudicial credibility excess that harms its targets qua knowers and transmitters of knowledge. I show how positive stereotyping and prejudicially inflated credibility assessments contribute to the continued epistemic oppression of marginalized knowers. In particular, I examine harms such as typecasting, compulsory representation, and epistemic exploitation and consider what hearers are obligated to do in response to these injustices. I argue that because epistemic harms to marginalized knowers also arise from prejudicially inflated assessments of their credibility, the virtue of testimonial justice must be revised to remedy them.     

Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Twin Earth

A popular form of virtue epistemology—defended by such figures as Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski and John Greco—holds that knowledge can be exclusively understood in virtue‐theoretic terms. In particular, it holds that there isn't any need for an additional epistemic condition to deal with the problem posed by knowledge‐undermining epistemic luck. It is argued that the sustainability of such a proposal is called into question by the possibility of epistemic twin earth cases. In particular, it is argued that such cases demonstrate the need for virtue‐theoretic accounts of knowledge to appeal to an independent epistemic condition which excludes knowledge‐undermining epistemic luck.     

The Epistemic Relevance of the Virtue of Justice

Recent literature on the relationship between knowledge and justice has tended to focus exclusively on the social and ethical dimensions of this relationship (e.g. social injustices related to knowledge and power, etc.). For the purposes of this article, I am interested in examining the virtue of justice and its effects on the cognitive faculties of its possessor (and, correspondingly, the effects of the vice of injustice). Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of justice, I argue that in certain cases justice can be a criterion of epistemic evaluation and that it deserves more attention than it has been given among virtue epistemologists. More precisely, the virtue of justice may become a criterion of epistemic evaluation in cases when a belief is formed on the basis of testimony. It would seem that there are cases when A’s assent to proposition p is something that is owed to B on the basis of B’s testimony; or there may be instances when A is culpable for declining to let B’s testimony have any effect on A’s belief. I briefly sketch four distinct scenarios in which this bears out.     

What We Owe to Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility of Fiction Creators

As audiences demand better and more diverse representation in the fictions they consume, there is a question of how that demand should be placed on fiction creators. In this article, I answer this question by arguing creators of fiction have a hermeneutical responsibility to include diverse characters in their creations, and to do so without relying on harmful stereotypes. I cast this responsibility as the epistemic virtue of due diligence, offset by epistemic laziness and epistemic paralysis as the corresponding vices of absence and excess, respectively. Practicing either vice can constitute a type of hermeneutical gap described by Katharine Jenkins, in which harmful stereotypes (conceptions) become more accessible to epistemic agents than the more accurate concept. By blocking the agent's access to the accurate conception, such stereotypes create a hermeneutical gap and can contribute to hermeneutical injustices, as described by Miranda Fricker and José Medina.     

Knowledge and Other Norms for Assertion,Action, and Belief: A Teleological Account

Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account , all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledge‐centered in its insistence that knowledge sets the fundamental epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. Largely in virtue of this pluralist character, I argue, the Teleological Account is far superior to extant knowledge‐centered accounts.     

Motivated Closed‐Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism

In this article we synthesize theory and research from several areas of psychology and political science to propose and test a causal model of the effects of threat on political attitudes. Based in part on prior research showing that fear, threat, and anxiety decrease cognitive capacity and motivation, we hypothesize that under high (vs. low) threat, people will seek to curtail open‐ended information searches and exhibit motivated closed‐mindedness (one aspect of the need for cognitive closure). The subjective desire for certainty, control, and closure, in turn, is expected to increase the individual's affinity for political conservatism, insofar as resistance to change and adherence to authority figures and conventional forms of morality are assumed to satisfy these epistemic motives more successfully than their ideological opposites. Consistent with this account, we find in Studies 1a and 1b that putting people into a highly threatened mindset leads them to exhibit an increase in motivated closed‐mindedness and to perceive the world as more dangerous. Furthermore, in Study 2 we demonstrate that a subtle threat manipulation increases self‐reported conservatism (or decreases self‐reported liberalism), and this effect is mediated by closed‐mindedness. In Study 3, we manipulated closed‐mindedness directly and found that high (vs. low) cognitive load results in a greater affinity for the Republican (vs. Democratic) party. Finally, in Study 4 we conducted an experiment involving political elites in Iceland and found that three different types of threat (to the self, group, and system) all led center‐right politicians to score higher on closed‐mindedness and issue‐based political conservatism. Implications for society and for the theory of ideology as motivated social cognition are discussed.     

“Tell Me How That Makes You Feel”: Philosophy's Reason/Emotion Divide and Epistemic Pushback in Philosophy Classrooms

Alison Bailey has recently explored the nature of what she calls privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback or “the variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when they are asked to consider both the lived experience and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily.” In this article, I want to use Bailey's argument to demonstrate how privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback is facilitated and obscured by the disciplinary tools of traditional Western philosophy. Specifically, through exploring philosophical cultures of justification and case studies, this work will reveal how students engage in privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback by deploying the reason/emotion divide and various philosophical norms and practices it underlies to protect their epistemic home turf. Then, I offer three emotion‐enhancing critical philosophical practices aimed at disrupting the ignorance‐promoting moves of privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback and, instead, engage emotion as epistemically significant.     

Sourcing Women's Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification

In this paper, I argue that although it is important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic exclusions, it is equally important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic inclusions. Partly in response to the historical exclusion of women's knowledge, there has been increasing effort among first‐world actors to seek out women's knowledge. This trend is apparent in efforts to mainstream gender in climate change negotiation. Here, one is told that women's superior knowledge about how to adapt to climate change makes them “poised to help solve and overcome this daunting challenge.” Pulling from the work of Miranda Fricker, I argue that such claims risk epistemically objectifying women. To illuminate the risk of women's epistemic objectification in climate change discourse, I offer a feminist analysis of current efforts to seek women's environmental knowledge, cautioning throughout that such efforts must reflect just epistemic relations.     

The notion of the moral: the relation between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology

In this paper I argue that virtue ethics should be understood as a form of ethics which integrates various domains of the practical in relation to which virtues are excellences. To argue this it is necessary to distinguish two senses of the “moral”: the broad sense which integrates the domains of the practical and a narrow classificatory sense. Virtue ethics, understood as above, believes that all genuine virtue should be understood as what I call virtues proper. To possess a virtue proper (such as an excellent disposition of open-mindedness, an epistemic virtue) is to possess a disposition of overall excellence in relation to the sphere or field of the virtue (being open to the opinions of others). Overall excellence in turn involves excellence in integrating to a sufficient degree, standards of excellence in all relevant practical domains. Epistemic virtues, sporting virtues, moral virtues, and so on are all virtues proper. In particular it is impossible for an epistemic virtue to be a moral (narrow sense) vice.     

Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Luck

The recent movement towards virtue–theoretic treatments of epistemological concepts can be understood in terms of the desire to eliminate epistemic luck. Significantly, however, it is argued that the two main varieties of virtue epistemology are responding to different types of epistemic luck. In particular, whilst proponents of reliabilism–based virtue theories have been focusing on the problem of what I call "veritic" epistemic luck, non–reliabilism–based virtue theories have instead been concerned with a very different type of epistemic luck, what I call "reflective" epistemic luck. It is argued that, prima facie at least, both forms of epistemic luck need to be responded to by any adequate epistemological theory. The problem, however, is that one can best eliminate veritic epistemic luck by adducing a so–called safety–based epistemological theory that need not be allied to a virtue–based account, and there is no fully adequate way of eliminating reflective epistemic luck. I thus conclude that this raises a fundamental difficulty for virtue–based epistemological theories, on either construal.     

Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Luck

The recent movement towards virtue–theoretic treatments of epistemological concepts can be understood in terms of the desire to eliminate epistemic luck. Significantly, however, it is argued that the two main varieties of virtue epistemology are responding to different types of epistemic luck. In particular, whilst proponents of reliabilism–based virtue theories have been focusing on the problem of what I call "veritic" epistemic luck, non–reliabilism–based virtue theories have instead been concerned with a very different type of epistemic luck, what I call "reflective" epistemic luck. It is argued that, prima facie at least, both forms of epistemic luck need to be responded to by any adequate epistemological theory. The problem, however, is that one can best eliminate veritic epistemic luck by adducing a so–called safety–based epistemological theory that need not be allied to a virtue–based account, and there is no fully adequate way of eliminating reflective epistemic luck. I thus conclude that this raises a fundamental difficulty for virtue–based epistemological theories, on either construal.     

Open‐Mindedness and Disagreement

The current debate about disagreement has as rivals those who take the steadfast view and those who affirm conciliationism. Those on the steadfast side maintain that resolute commitment to a belief is reasonable despite peer disagreement. Conciliationists say that peer disagreement necessarily undermines warrant for one’s belief. This article discusses the relevance of open‐mindedness to the matter of peer disagreement. It shows how both the steadfast and the conciliatory perspective are consistent with a robust and substantive display of open‐mindedness. However, it also turns out that there are more ways to display open‐mindedness on the steadfast view than on the conciliatory view.     

ROBUST VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY AND EPISTEMIC ANTI‐INDIVIDUALISM

According to robust virtue epistemology, knowledge is a cognitive achievement, where this means that the agent's cognitive success is because of her cognitive ability. One type of objection to robust virtue epistemology that has been put forward in the contemporary literature is that this view has problems dealing with certain kinds of testimonial knowledge, and thus that it is in tension with standard views in the epistemology of testimony. We build on this critique to argue that insofar as agents epistemically depend on third‐party members of their epistemic community as many social epistemologists contend, then there will be cases where two agents differ epistemically despite being virtue‐theoretic duplicates. This means that robust virtue epistemology, at least insofar as it is understood along standard lines such that it endorses epistemic individualism, is also in tension with a central commitment of contemporary social epistemology.     

Should Political Philosophers Attend to Victim Testimony?

There is a growing recognition that victims of injustice may have privileged access to knowledge about the injustices they experience, and that injustices are perpetuated through silencing victims by taking them to be less credible, and through denying them the platform and capacity to speak. However, these are not ideas that political philosophers tend to engage with in a sustained manner, to the extent that they alter methodological approaches to be systematically attentive to victim testimony. In this article, I provide two arguments in favour of political philosophers attending to victim testimony, one moral, one epistemic, and demonstrate that the moral case has little purchase, but that the epistemic case is more successful. Then, I present the strongest case against including victim testimony in political philosophy, and I argue that it does not hold up to scrutiny. In so doing, I demonstrate how methodological practices in political philosophy could be improved through drawing on feminist social epistemology; attending to victim testimony can enrich political philosophy in epistemically acceptable ways, and it also corrects for a range of potential biases.     

Tracking Privilege‐Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home‐terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social‐justice content. Privilege‐preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical‐thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege‐preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions.     

Bolzanian knowing: infallibility,virtue and foundational truth

The paper discusses Bernard Bolzano’s epistemological approach to believing and knowing with regard to the epistemic requirements of an axiomatic model of science. It relates Bolzano’s notions of believing, knowing and evaluation to notions of infallibility, immediacy and foundational truth. If axiomatic systems require their foundational truths to be infallibly known, this knowledge involves both evaluation of the infallibility of the asserted truth and evaluation of its being foundational. The twofold attempt to examine one’s assertions and to do so by searching for the objective grounds of the truths asserted lies at the heart of Bolzano’s notion of knowledge. However, the explanatory task of searching for grounds requires methods that cannot warrant infallibility. Hence, its constitutive role in a conception of knowledge seems to imply the fallibility of such knowledge. I argue that the explanatory task contained in Bolzanian knowing involves a high degree of epistemic virtues, and that it is only through some salient virtue that the credit of infallibility can distinguish Bolzanian knowing from a high degree of Bolzanian believing.