Educating against intellectual vices

ABSTRACT

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV.

KEYWORDS:

• Vice epistemology
• epistemic vices
• teaching intellectual virtues
• intellectual character education
• negative epistemic exemplars

Acknowledgement

I thank the School of Humanities at Ateneo de Manila University for granting me a research load that gave me the time and space to conduct this research. I am also grateful to Quassim Cassam, Mark Alfano, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Kotzee (2014) and Baehr (2016) for anthologies on this overlap, and more recently, Curren (2019).

2. Following common usage in the literature, I use ‘intellectual’ and ‘epistemic’ interchangeably to qualify virtues and vices. I occasionally drop ‘intellectual’ or ‘epistemic’ for brevity, but the reader must keep in mind that I refer explicitly to intellectual virtues and vices, unless otherwise stated.

3. The literature of intellectual character education dominantly understands ‘intellectual virtues’ in the ‘responsibilist’ or character-based sense, rather than the ‘reliabilist’ or competence-based sense.

4. While explicit instruction could be used to teach how seeking the knowledge that one lacks and trusting an expert are both acts of intellectual humility, it is not easy to teach which action is the appropriate way of owning one’s limitation in each specific context, given that an educator cannot give a sort of manual to cover all possible situations where intellectual humility might be elicited. One needs practical wisdom to discern this, but practical wisdom is precisely something that a novice lacks. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for requesting clarification here.

5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to be more charitable towards proponents of EFIV here. It also helped me clarify my position vis-à-vis the two challenges discussed in the paper.

6. For instance, Battaly might consider Suzume’s lack of interest as an act of closed-mindedness since it shows an ‘unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options’ (2018, 26), even though Suzume might not be blameworthy for this given that she is presently hungry. A different example could be constructed here, where Suzume fails to act open-mindedly in a way that also does not satisfy this particular account of closed-mindedness. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making this point.

7. Crerar (2018) argues against what he calls the ‘inversion thesis,’ which is the view that virtues and vices are straightforward opposites. More explicitly, ‘for any given feature of virtue,’ according to this view, ‘vice can be assumed to involve either the evaluative opposite of that feature, or else its absence’ (Crerar 2018, 764). I take Crerar’s position here when I say that it is possible for students to avoid vicious behavior without necessarily claiming that they have learned to be virtuous; just because they were not vicious doesn’t necessarily mean that they were virtuous.

8. Aristotle describes acts of moral virtue here, but virtue epistemologists have adapted this view for acts of intellectual virtue as well.

9. Cassam (2019) gives plenty of vice exemplars: Israeli intelligence officers being closed-minded when they refused to believe that Egypt would attack them in 1973 despite available evidence in favor of this belief (2019, 28–30); Lord Denning’s and Lord Lane’s closed-minded thinking when they decided on the case of the Birmingham Six in 1974 (2019, 53–56), Gerd Heidemann’s gullibility for believing that he was given an authentic diary of Hitler despite insufficient evidence (2019, 121–123).

10. I used Sullivan and Alfano’s (2019) ambivalence-avoidance model in this paper since it is the only available conception of negative epistemic exemplars in the literature, but developing other models based on more straightforward negative emotions could improve my argument here. Furthermore, it will take some empirical legwork to demonstrate which model of vice exemplars would be most pedagogically effective, which suggests the need for future work. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for comments that helped articulate this.

11. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for articulating this objection and inviting me to address it.