Intellectual Virtue #3: T. Ryan Byerly – Part II: Definition of Virtue

Terminology note: 'Intellectual virtue', 'philosophical virtue', and 'virtues of inquiry' all mean the same thing.

 

"When a person fails in these ways—not caring about the truth, not believing what is warranted, attending only selectively to relevant evidence—he fails in a particularly bad way. He fails as an inquirer." (151)

 

 "These virtues [intellectual virtues] are united in being conceived of as habits or dispositions of inquiry that orient us toward achieving good intellectual ends. They are, we might say, excellent ways of being good for intellectual goals—goals such as obtaining true beliefs, believing responsibly, and achieving knowledge and understanding. Intellectual virtues are traits that make persons and their communities good at accomplishing these valuable intellectual goals. They are stable features of our character that help us to carry out the task of inquiry with excellence.

    It is a basic assumption of part 2 that these intellectual virtues can be acquired and strengthened. Those who don't have them can gain them through practice, and those who have them to some degree can have them in greater measure." (152)

 

So it sounds like virtues are:

 

1) Stable features of our character;

 

2) Dispositions, which I take to be a specific kind of feature of a person's character (character being something you have but are not identical to). A disposition is a tendency to behave, react, or take on a certain attitude given a particular context.

 

(Thus, virtues are stable dispositions.) 

 

So an angry person is a person who tends to behave angrily, to react with anger, or to become angry given relevant contexts.

 

So 'disposition' is basically synonymous with 'habit' or 'tendency'. An angry person has a habit of behaving angrily, reacting with anger, or becoming angry. But 'habit' may not be the best word, as it evokes the idea of bad habits versus good habits, which are frequent behaviors built up through repeated action, like the habit of brushing your teeth after every meal or turning on the coffee machine every morning. But a person with a disposition might not have a habit in that sense of a frequent or common behavior. If someone has a habit of being generous, it sounds like they are often generous. But someone could be disposed toward generosity and yet never be generous because they lack the disposable funds. This of course can be clarified by: a habit or tendency given such and such circumstances. A generous person has a habit or tendency of being generous given that they have enough money.

 

'Habit' still doesn't sound quite right to me, as it evokes the idea of subconscious reflex, like muscle memory. But when a person decides to be generous, it may not be like muscle memory at all, but quite conscious and deliberate, but still evidence that this person has a disposition for being generous.

 

You might want to say that a generous person is disposed to give even when they don't have enough money. After all, when a poor person gives, isn't that much more meaningful, more indicative of their heart? (Jesus and the Widow's Offering comes to mind.)

 

I think common sense would say that it's not prudent to give when doing so places yourself in a position of needing aid, unless you have good reason for making that sacrifice. So giving when you cannot afford it is not necessarily virtuous.

It’s undeniable that there are many wealthy people who could easily afford to give a much larger percentage of their income or wealth and still live a highly comfortable life, but they refuse to do this, perhaps because a) they don't want to empower people they look down upon, b) they believe that "the poors" don't deserve the money and don't want to express, or be seen expressing, any sense of valuing someone they, or others, deem lesser, and c) they want to maximize the power differential between them and everyone else. So 'generous' to me evokes the idea of a person who refuses to be greedy and hateful in this way, and gives when they aren't forced to, giving out of a genuine love of others and desire to help them. So giving only to the degree that it doesn’t change your standard of living is not necessarily greedy, though it’s tricky trying to argue which standard of living is fair for which person.

Setting generosity aside and taking another example: it makes sense to say that someone would save people from a burning building had they the power to do so and were in the right place at the right time. ‘Disposed’ is like ‘poised’ in this way, and dispositions answer modal questions about what a person would do (or very likely would do) or how they would react or what attitude they would take under certain circumstances. (Could it be that dispositions are what ground modal facts about human behavior? What makes it true that I would fly around for fun were I granted the power to fly? Why, features of my character! My dispositions! Hypothetical truths can be grounded by current, non-hypothetical facts. So true modal claims about myself make reference to real properties about myself.)

Virtues are, after all, a matter of where the heart is at and not where the body is at.

It might be tempting to say that a person who is merely disposed to be brave and yet never gets the opportunity to be brave can’t be a brave person. A brave person is someone who in fact acts bravely. But the problem in that case is that there is no evidence that this person is a brave person. So when we describe someone as brave, we are describing them as evidently brave.

In short, dispositions are not the same as habits or tendencies.

So a person can be virtuous without opportunity. But there will be no evidence of said virtue without opportunity.

 

3) Virtues orient us toward achieving good goals.

So more specific kinds of virtues will specify that goal. Intellectual virtues orient us toward achieving good goals related to truth: the goal of maximizing one’s true beliefs, minimizing one’s false beliefs, and increasing one’s knowledge and understanding. 

So in a nutshell virtues are stable dispositions that orient us toward achieving good goals.

Five extra notes:

1) When I get to Aristotle I will discuss the relationship between virtue and emotion. While in this post I defined the disposition in terms of behavior, reaction, or attitude (which sounds fine to me), it may be more accurate to define the disposition purely in terms of emotion (which of course leads to corresponding action).

2) The language here (e.g. ‘orient us’) is consequentialist. So virtues result in good consequences; they enable us and indeed cause us to achieve good goals.

3) ‘Good goals’ refers to goals related to maximizing flourishing, maximizing eudaimonia, or more simply maximizing goodness.

4) Someone might be good at something, like robbing banks. But you might think that robbing banks is itself not good. In a similar way, someone could be good at maximizing true-but-irrelevant beliefs. Is this person intellectually virtuous? No, because it’s a part of being good at seeing the truth to see which truths are more important than others. And if virtues orient us toward achieving good goals, and only relevant truths do this, then only maximizing one’s relevantly true beliefs is virtuous.

So good intellectual goals are subordinate to the more fundamental goal of maximizing goodness, and are good because they are necessary for the more fundamental goal of maximizing goodness.

 

5) We might also want our definition of virtue to touch on the relationship between virtue and wisdom, vice, and the golden mean. Perhaps by this: 

Golden mean: a balance between two extremes. A virtue is a golden mean (read: ideal average) as it is a balance between two vices.

Wisdom: a particular mental power, the power to discern what is virtuous and what is vicious.

Virtues: stable dispositions that orient us toward achieving good goals. A virtuous person is disposed to have an emotional reaction that strikes a balance between two extremes—of lack or excess—which correspond to vices.

Vices: stable dispositions that fail to orient us toward achieving good goals. A vicious person is disposed to have an emotional reaction that is either too deficient or too extreme.