ABSTRACT
What is an intellectual virtue? The literature in virtue epistemology has offered two main answers: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Led by Ernest Sosa (2007) and John Greco (2010), virtue reliabilism argues that intellectual virtues are stable dispositions to reliably produce true beliefs. Sosa and Greco are willing to count an array of reliable dispositions—be they faculties, skills, or character traits—as intellectual virtues. Reliabilist virtues will include, for instance, hard-wired faculties of reliable vision and memory, the acquired skill of identifying birds by their songs, and the acquired character trait of open-mindedness (provided that it is reliable). Sosa and Greco think that intellectual virtues must be reliable, but need not be acquired, nor need they be praiseworthy or personal. In contrast, led by Linda Zagzebski (1996), Jason Baehr (2011), and James Montmarquet (1993), virtue responsibilism argues that intellectual virtues must be character traits, like open-mindedness and intellectual humility, over which we have some control and for which we are (partly) responsible. Inspired by work in Aristotelian virtue ethics, responsibilists argue that like moral virtues, intellectual virtues must be acquired, praiseworthy, and personal. They disagree about whether intellectual virtues require reliability.
