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.

Intellectual Virtue #3 - T. Ryan Byerly - Part I: Skills vs Virtues

Byerly, T. Ryan. Introducing logic and critical thinking: the skills of reasoning and the virtues of inquiry. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017.

 

Part I: Skills vs Virtues 

 

"There are various ways to distinguish between skills on the one hand and virtues on the other. But perhaps the most important difference between the two is the following: a person is not deficient as a person for lacking any particular skills, but a person is deficient as a person for lacking virtues, including intellectual ones." (1)

 

Because I reject free will, I reject the notion of someone being deficient as a person. Byerly goes on to give the example: Lacking in basketball skills makes you deficient as a basketball player, but not as a person. But I think this kind of specification must be carried through in all contexts. Being deficient "as a person" is too vague and doesn't make any sense to me. Being deficient as a reasoner or as a decision-maker or as a flourishing-maximizer or as an empathizer – that is more specific and makes more sense to me.

 

A person's ability to reason or to make decisions or to maximize flourishing is largely dependent on their intelligence, which is something beyond their control. And so one's reasoning abilities, decision-making abilities, empathy, and abilities with respect to maximizing flourishing are likewise beyond one's control, and so they do not reflect in any meaningful way the quality of the person, but rather the quality of what the person happens to have. In the same way that basketball skills are something a person has, but is not identical to, so too are virtues something a person has but is not identical to.

 

The idea of a "bad person", as in an evil person, is a simplified shorthand for a person who lacks empathy, lacks understanding of the badness of the pain of others, lacks the understanding needed to maximize flourishing and minimize suffering, and who disregards the well-being of others (this being still an oversimplification of what it means to be an evil person).

 

Many skills don't speak to a person's empathy or understanding of the goodness of the flourishing of others, while virtues do*, so in that sense there is a moral distinction between skill and virtue, but I see no reason to make a moral distinction between skill and virtue in the sense of what either says about the quality of the person per se rather than the quality of what the person has. 

 

*Some skills, like being a skilled parent or doctor, do indicate high empathy (I'm including empathy-based skills like bedside manner, care, and genuine listening), while a person's "virtues" of self-control and discipline with respect to diet and exercise might reflect their desire to take advantage of the halo effect and manipulate others. So what appears to be a mere skill may indicate serious virtue, and what may appear to be a virtue may ironically indicate vice, or a mix of virtue and vice.

 

If skills reflect a person's understanding, capacity, dispositions, and habits, and if virtues also reflect a person's understanding, capacity, dispositions, and habits, then skills and virtues are very similar. Except skills are generally value-neutral in that they can be used in virtuous or vicious ways.

 

I imagine I will return to the topic of skills vs virtues when I read Zagzebski's book on virtue. I also imagine that the conversation of skill vs virtue will be similar to the conversation of capacity (ability) vs virtue. E.g. Intelligence is usually not taken to be a skill or virtue, but a capacity / ability.

31 August 2025

Today:

• Continue Intellectual Virtue series, working on Intellectual Virtue #3: T. Ryan Byerly.

 Future:

• Intellectual Virtue #4: Josh Rasmussen
• Intellectual Virtue #5: Aristotle
• Intellectual Virtue #6 (19 parts): Zagzebski's book
• Intellectual Virtue #7 (15 parts): Philip Dow's book
• Intellectual Virtue #8: Gabriel Citron paper
• Intellectual Virtue #9? Misc papers

Intellectual Virtue #2 - Michael Huemer on Intellectual Virtue

Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value, 2021. 

 

"What is it to think rationally? It is, in a certain sense, to think correctly. It is, for example, to accept the conclusions that one has good reason to accept, to avoid contradicting oneself, to avoid invalid deductive inferences or uncogent non-deductive inferences, to avoid reasoning circularly, and so on. . . . I don't mean necessarily having true beliefs . . . it is possible to be fully rational but mistaken, and also possible to be highly irrational yet luckily arrive at the truth." (25)  

 

"This shows that one can think rationally yet be wrong, and one can think irrationally yet be right. This can happen, but of course it usually does not. One way of characterizing rational beliefs is to say that they are the beliefs that are likely to be true, given the experiences and information available to you at the time. . . . Notice, by the way, that what is rational to believe is, as we say, 'relative to an observer': In other words, believing p could be rational for one person but not for another. This is because people might have different experiences and information available to them." (26)

 

"People sometimes wonder: Why should we be rational? . . . Given my account of rationality above, this question is not really sensible. It is like the question, 'Why are cats so feline?' or 'What color was George Washington's white horse?': If you understand what the question means, you don't need to ask it. To ask why one should be rational is to request a reason for being rational. But this is, in effect, to ask for a reason for responding to reasons – for example, a reason for believing what one has most reason to believe. If p is the rational thing for you to believe, then, by definition, it makes sense for you to believe that – because that's what we meant by calling it 'rational'. Once you have granted that p is rational, you've already granted that you have sufficient reason to believe p, so you don't need an additional reason 'to believe the rational things'." (27)

 

I can put it this way: Why should we be rational? ⟶ Why should we justify our beliefs and behaviors? ⟶ Why should we give reasons for our beliefs and behaviors? ⟶ Why should we give good answers to theoretical 'why' questions about our beliefs and behaviors? ⟶ Why should we demand good answers to 'why' questions? ⟶ Why should we ask why?

 

By asking this question you are demanding a good answer to a why question while simultaneously questioning that demand. That's self-refuting. If you accept the act of asking 'why' questions, then it doesn't make sense to question that act, and if you don't accept the act, then it doesn't make sense to perform it.

 

"If you understand what the question means, you don't need to ask it." By asking a 'why' question, any 'why' question, you demonstrate an understanding of the need for explanation in terms of one's beliefs and behaviors. If you understand the need for explanation in terms of one's beliefs and behaviors, then you understand the need to be rational.

 

Though you might wonder what is the goal of rationality, or what goal does rationality further. That answer is easy: the goal is to arrive at true beliefs and to avoid false beliefs. As Huemer puts it: "So when someone asks, 'Why be rational?', perhaps they are asking: Why aim at having true beliefs?" (27) So we might put the question of why be rational as: I am seeking the truth about why should we seek truth. Whatever reason you have for seeking the truth about why should we seek truth, that same reason answers the question.

 

Huemer gives two reasons for seeking truth: First, your goals require you to have true beliefs. And second, it is immoral to think irrationally. I agree with these, though I might understand the idea of 'immorality' differently than how Huemer understands it. 

 

I'd add that we might seek truth for simple reasons surrounding pain and pleasure: We might simply feel curious to know what the truth is about something we find interesting, and experience a satisfaction in finding the answer, or experience relief from the frustration of not knowing. We naturally seek explanations to understand the world, and so it's no surprise we would seek explanations to understand why people believe and behave as they do.

 

Continuing:

 

"Intellectual virtues are character traits that help us form beliefs well, particularly traits that tend to help you get to the truth and avoid error in normal circumstances. Rationality is the master intellectual virtue, the one that subsumes all the others. (So if you are rational, you are intellectually virtuous, and vice versa.) But there is another intellectual virtue that is also extremely important, so much so that it also deserves a section of its own in this chapter. The virtue is objectivity. Objectivity, like all other intellectual virtues, is part of rationality. The character trait of objectivity is a disposition to resist bias, and hence to base one's beliefs on the objective facts. The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires, or by how the phenomenon in the world is related to you, as opposed to how the external world is independent of you." (32)

 

". . . we often think of those we are arguing with as opponents, but we really shouldn't do so. We should think of them as fellow truth-seekers. . . ." (33)

 

"Objectivity is not to be confused with neutrality . . . I am not recommending that you refuse to take a side on controversial issues. It is generally false that both sides are equally good, and you should not refuse to evaluate issues. What I am recommending is that, if you take a side, you nevertheless treat the other side fairly, even while defending your side. I am recommending that you treat intellectual debate as a mutual truth-seeking enterprise, rather than as a personal contest." (34)

 

"As a rational thinker, you want your beliefs to be true, so you should welcome the opportunity to discover if your own current view is wrong; then you can eliminate a mistaken belief and move closer to the truth. If you are afraid to confront the strongest opposing views, represented in the fairest way possible, that means that you suspect that your own beliefs are not up to the challenge, which means you already suspect that your beliefs are false." (34) 

 

"The main thing human beings need, to make progress on debates in philosophy (and religion, and politics), is more objectivity. The human mind is not really designed for discovering abstract, philosophical truths. Our natural tendency is to try to advance our own interests or the interests of the group we identify with, and we tend to treat intellectual issues as a proxy battleground for that endeavor. Again, we don't expressly decide to do this; we do it automatically unless we are making a concerted, conscious effort not to. And naturally, when we do this, we form all sorts of false beliefs, because reality does not adjust itself to whatever is convenient for our particular social faction." (35)

 

"All the paradigm forms of prejudice are, centrally and obviously, failures to be objective." (38)

 

Huemer gives tips on becoming more objective. Paraphrasing:

 

1) Acknowledge your bias;

 

2) Diversify your sources of information;

 

3) Think of reasons why your own views might be wrong.

 

Huemer points out a curious paradox – the paradox of bias and knowledge. The most biased folks tend to be the most knowledgeable. A scientist is biased in favor of the view that science is really important, but that scientist is also knowledgeable about science. The solution is to not throw out biased views automatically, as that would require throwing out well-informed views. Instead, diversify your exposure to well-informed-yet-biased views to get a more balanced picture of the options available and the arguments for and against each option.

 

I'm not sure I'd consider rationality to be the mother virtue of intellectual virtues. Defining rationality as "thinking well" makes rationality sound no different from intelligence. Though I suppose I actually would consider intelligence to be a fundamentally important trait for increasing the probability that one arrives at true beliefs and avoids false ones. But 1) intelligence needn't lead to the kinds of truths we are concerned with in this context, which are philosophical truths, and 2) Intelligence (the breadth and depth of one's mental powers) is probably considered a capacity or ability rather than a virtue. I'm not sure the distinction matters; as far as I'm concerned, any characteristic that makes it more likely for a person to arrive at true philosophical beliefs and avoid false ones is an intellectual virtue, which would include intelligence as a virtue.

 

Regardless, I would think of "passion for truth" or "love of truth" or "hunger for truth" or "curiosity" or "desire to believe what's true" as being the mother virtue of the intellectual virtues. Only someone who cares about truth will care about whether they possess all the other virtues that lead to truth, and indeed it may be a person's passion for truth that explains how it's even possible for that person to come to possess other intellectual virtues.

 

In light of what I say in this post: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/02/what-is-virtue-what-does-it-mean-to-be.html

 

I might do the taxonomy like so:

 

Intelligence = the breadth and depth of one's mental powers.

 

Wisdom = the mental power to be able to see (i.e. understand) the golden mean between two vices; the ability to recognize what is virtuous and vicious. (The idea being that it's impossible to understand without acting according to that understanding, assuming you have the power to act; in other words, wisdom immediately leads to virtue; it's impossible to be wise and not virtuous.)

 

Virtue = the golden mean between two vices; a virtuous action is the action a virtuous person would perform, an action that achieves the optimal balance between two extreme actions; a virtue is a character trait that describes what kind of a person you are, namely how you are  disposed to behave in a manner corresponding to the virtue in question. For example, bravery is a character trait that describes a person as brave, meaning that they are disposed to act bravely rather than recklessly (vice 1) or cowardly (vice 2).

 

['Person' here is understood in terms of your accidental properties. That is, virtues and vices are technically things you have; you are not identical to your virtues and vices.] 

 

There are different options for understanding what it means to act bravely. Aristotle would say that the brave man feels the right amount of fear. A reckless man feels too little fear than what he ought; a coward feels too much fear, while a brave man feels the right amount of fear. We might call this an emotion-based view of virtue.

 

An issue with this view is that there are cases where the right amount of fear you ought to feel is little to none. But it doesn't sound right to say a man acted bravely when he felt little to no fear; rather, such a man is fearless, which may or may not be a good thing depending on the situation.

 

A second option would be to say that a brave man is one who feels potentially a great deal of fear but overcomes that fear through strength. This is especially important when you consider people with anxiety disorders. When you have an anxiety disorder, you experience an unreasonable amount of fear. But it doesn't sound right to say that people with anxiety are automatically cowards just because they are predisposed to feel more fear than they ought. If the amygdalae in your brain are physically unusual, through mutation or a neurodevelopmental disorder (like autism), then it's not your fault that you feel too much fear; your brain literally causes you to feel that way. People with anxiety can learn to manage it and can, at least on occasion, overcome the overwhelming amount of fear their anxiety causes them to feel. So people with anxiety disorders are positioned to exemplify all the more bravery, because they have more opportunities to do so, because anxiety makes you nervous even in ordinary situations and because the amount of fear they feel is greater than normal.

 

We might call this a strength-based view of virtue.

 

Maybe the emotion view is correct for some virtues, while the strength view is correct for others. For example, in the case of bravery, the strength view is correct; the brave person has the strength to do the right thing despite their fear; a coward fails to overcome their fear while a reckless person too easily overcomes their fear, failing to be cautious. But in the case of confidence, feeling too much confidence is arrogance while feeling too little is insecurity.

 

An issue with the strength view may be that there's no such thing as having too much strength, so a vice of excess strength doesn't really make sense. For example, you might argue that it's exactly the emotion of arrogance that allows a person to overcome their fear too easily. So the emotion view can't be avoided.

 

So a third option might be a hybrid view on which vices of deficiency are deficiencies of strength, while vices of excess are excesses of emotion.

 

But you could argue that there are situations where a deficiency of emotion is a failure to appreciate the magnitude of a situation. Righteous indignation is an appropriate kind of anger in reaction to injustice. Failing to feel anger in the face of injustice is apathy or callousness.

 

Besides, you might argue that even in the case of bravery, where one has sufficient strength to overcome their fear, that there is an appropriate level of emotion, something like determination, that allows one to overcome their fear. So bravery might be something like "feeling appropriate levels of determination to the point of overcoming feelings of fear", cowardice = "a deficiency of determination to the point of being overwhelmed by fear" or "feeling overly concerned with one's own survival at the expense of the greater good", recklessness = "arrogance or ignorance in the face of threat, leading to a lack of caution." This satisfies the intuition that in order to count as brave, fear must be present. 

 

A note on dispositions: You can take a probabilistic view of dispositions or a determining view. The probabilistic view says that if someone is disposed to do x, then generally they will do x, but it's not a guarantee. The determining view says that if someone is disposed to do x, then they will do x given the chance. 

 

I lean toward the determining view for the following reason: if someone does something cowardly, then it sounds strange to describe that person as brave because "they generally do the brave thing but didn't this time." The person is a de facto coward with respect to that situation. When someone is brave in some cases and not others, that's not because dispositions are probabilistic, but because there are many types of bravery and someone can possess some braveries while lacking others.

 

Given a consequentialist view, the badness of vice is grounded in the bad consequences of vices, and the goodness of virtue is grounded in the good consequences of having virtue.

 

Rationality, as a character trait, could refer to a number of things:

 

Rationality(1): The mental power related to formal reasoning, such as the ability to understand logical operators, to see whether an argument is valid or invalid, and to spot contradictions.

 

Rationality(2): The mental power related to informal reasoning, such as the ability to understand the importance of intellectual virtue, the importance of steelmanning rather than strawmanning, the ability to understand which fallacies matter and why and when, how to be a good discussant, and so on.

 

Rationality(3): The character trait that constitutes the disposition of having good reasons for one's beliefs and behaviors (in other words, the disposition of giving good answers to 'why' questions about your beliefs and behaviors). Basically, reasonableness. Also: The ability to tell which reasons are in fact good ones; not believing things on the basis of bad reasons; being "responsive to reasons."

 

Rationality(4): Being rational as opposed to emotional, meaning feeling the right degree of emotion. Given the emotion view of virtue, this just means to be virtuous, or disposed to feel the right emotion to the right degree. Basically, levelheadedness. (Which translates into choosing the balanced action – it is by feeling the right emotion to the right degree that the right action is chosen. But with virtue, as an expression of wisdom, there's also a sense of understanding the consequences of various actions and being disposed to choosing the action with optimal consequences. So we might say it is by understanding that one feels the right emotion to the right degree.)

 

You can probably collapse all of these into a unified sense of rationality:

 

Rationality(U): The mental power related to understanding the principles of formal and informal reasoning and to analyzing arguments. This power, when combined with sufficient opportunities of education and reflection, generates the disposition of giving good answers to questions about why you believe and behave as you do.

This leaves out Rationality(4), but that is captured better by the notion of being virtuous anyway.

 

Test: Let's imagine the following:

 

A Christian refuses to read atheist books because he is afraid of finding out that he is wrong about views he wants to be right about.

 

This is a clear-cut case of intellectual cowardice. Question: What makes it cowardly?

 

A) The Christian feels too much fear. Really, he shouldn't be afraid at all of having his views challenged, and instead should be eager to have his beliefs corrected.

 

B) The right thing to do is to subject your beliefs to challenges. That's the only way to find out if they withstand scrutiny. If your goal is to believe what's true and avoid believing what's false, then you must do this. What's cowardly is not feeling the fear of losing your most cherished beliefs, which is a perfectly understandable feeling, but rather allowing that fear to prevent you from doing what's right – failing to overcome that fear with the determination to do the right thing.

 

On one hand, it makes sense to say that the virtuous person is the one who feels the ideal kinds and levels of emotions. It would be impressive for a Christian to fearlessly engage with atheist material with the understanding that he will grow closer to the truth either way. So is fearlessness the real virtue here?

 

And yet, there are many explanations why a Christian would be scared of the idea that Christianity is not true.

 

1) All past attempts to convert people are retroactively misguided, embarrassing, and harmful;

 

2) You have been massively mistaken all this time;

 

3) Your parents / community have been massively mistaken all this time;

 

4) Your heroes, such as pastors and missionaries, have been massively mistaken all this time;

 

5) Concluding that Christianity is false means losing your place in the church and losing your sense of community, requiring you to go alone or to find a new community (who may or may not accept you, and it's not like they will accept you because it's "what Jesus would do");

 

6) Losing family members and potentially being disowned by parents;

 

7) Facing the reality that death is the permanent end of you, losing the sense that life is this grand, eternal adventure – coming to view life as infinitely less meaningful than before;

 

8) Losing the belief that you as an eternal being are a being of infinite worth – coming to the view that your value is very limited;

 

9) Facing the reality that there is no God who loves you, further removing a significant source of validation and sense of self-worth;

 

10) Removing all future experiences of feeling God's presence in prayer and feeling loved by God;

 

11) Removing the sense of purpose of going forth to create disciples of every nation;

 

12) Feeling pressured by time now that you only have one life to live;

 

13) Losing the sense of safety that comes with believing that there is a loving God watching over you and your family, potentially becoming much more anxious and distrusting of life, losing the ability to embrace life as this fundamentally safe thing and instead living with a greater sense of dread, fear, and paranoia;

 

14) Losing the sense that life is ultimately fair and just as God will perfectly judge everyone in the end and set the record straight – instead, life is made out to be brutally unfair and all sorts of injustices will never be set straight ever – this is especially true for innocent victims of disease and murder;

 

15) Losing the belief that evils will be redeemed and made meaningful – instead, evils are left gratuitous;

 

16) Losing the hope that you will one day see your loved ones again in heaven;

 

17) Losing the sentiment that this world is worth fighting for;

 

18) Losing the belief that you must be as good a person as possible because this life is a test by God, and any evils committed will be acknowledged by God later – instead, evil people straight up get away with their evil in many cases and are indeed often advantaged by it;

 

19) Losing the belief that life is ultimately full of a deep spiritual reality, and that life is a grand story – instead, life is profoundly shallow, empty, and boring, nothing more than particles smashing together in extremely complex, but ultimately meaningless, ways.

 

20) Losing all basis by which to live one's life, feeling lost and confused;

 

21) Losing all sense of one's identity and place in the world (no longer made in God's image or a Child of God or regenerated by the Holy Spirit). 

 

The thought of losing all of this is understandably terrifying. So it's not remotely fair to expect a Christian to not feel any fear whatsoever over the thought that Christianity is false. But it is fair to call out a Christian for not overcoming that fear and doing the right thing as a truthseeker and engaging in opposition material. 

 

It seems like to understand what makes something a virtue we must first understand what makes a virtue good and what makes a vice bad, and thus we must understand what grounds the success of a virtue and what grounds the failure of a vice. Virtues are related to hitting some kind of mark, but what mark is that exactly?

 

We can keep these questions in mind as we go through this series on intellectual virtue.

09 June 2025 - Thoughts

• Today I'm working on post #2 in my series on intellectual virtue. This will examine the words of Michael Huemer.
• Yesterday I posted quotes and some responses to Joe Schmid's words on intellectual virtue. I'm basically in total agreement, especially with the idea that virtue is the foundation of critical thinking. Where does philosophy begin? It begins with psychology, with the kind of person you are. If you are the kind of person who wants answers to philosophical questions, then you are the right kind of person for doing philosophy. If you are the kind of person who wants truth, then there are certain practices and attitudes you will take on to maximize your chances of finding the truth and ensuring that you are not stuck in falsehoods. 
• Disagreements: I will probably take a different approach to defining virtue, and I also clashed somewhat with the idea that there is always room for rational disagreement (even on complex topics). Depending on how we define rationality, rational disagreement is not possible; at least one person believes on the basis of false reasons. But you cannot blame someone for believing on the basis of false reasons, especially when the person is not believing on the basis of intellectual vices like wishful thinking or social pressure.
• There are two senses of blame here. On the first sense, you cannot blame anyone at all ever for any of their beliefs, because you cannot blame someone for their intelligence, knowledge, and so on. We do not choose our beliefs and we do not choose what makes sense to us. On the second sense, you can "blame" someone in the sense of acknowledging that there is something this person lacks. Some kinds of believing will reveal more of a lack than others. There is rational disagreement in the sense that people can disagree without lacking anything other than knowledge, which doesn't speak badly about the person qua truthseeker. Other kinds of disagreement involve a lack of intellectual virtue, which does speak badly about the person qua truthseeker.
• I had written some on tribalism in general and tribalism within Christianity, inspired by Joe's remarks on tribalism, but those writings have been lost. I think the gist of what I had to say was that 1) Tribalism involves us-versus-them thinking, echo chambers, socially reinforced beliefs (believing not because something makes sense, but because you will be socially punished otherwise), sophistry (saying words for the effect the words have on others, not for the truth of the words), heuristics, group psychology, ego, defensiveness, identity, group identity, doing things not because they are good or true but because they help the tribe and help your standing within the tribe, and a number of other pernicious things that I don't currently remember. 2) Tribalism thus causes intellectual vice and thus impedes truthseeking. 3) Tribalism is a problem that cannot be solved because humans depend on tribes for their survival. Even being a truthseeker runs the risk of falling into tribalist traps with "us truthseekers vs those irrational non-truthseekers" way of thinking. 4) The closest to a solution is to be radically socially independent. But this is impossible in most cases. Either you depend on family for survival, or you depend on a job. Both cases involve social structures and social structures are tribes. Survival and (philosophical) truthseeking sadly come apart in many ways, which is why humans are so overwhelmingly bad at philosophy. 5) You can try to select or procure a tribe that is the least tribalistic, but it's hard to see how tribalism can be fully eliminated. Being aware of tribalism and selecting or procuring a tribe in a strategic way can mitigate or even eliminate some of tribalism's worst effects. But how far can that go? It seems to me that tribalism is a fundamental feature of human nature. You could say that ego death is necessary to defeat tribalism. But how can someone undergo an ego death and continue living in this world as if you are concerned about your own survival? To live just is to live as a surviving thing, a thing concerned about its survival. How can you both undergo an ego death and be a thing concerned about its survival? 
• I will discuss virtue more broadly when I get to Aristotle.
• After this series I would like to do a brief series on Plato and Aristotle. That will be quick to put together as I've already done most of the work.
• I have Huemer's new book on knowledge, so that's on the to-read list. I will probably go into knowledge after mistakes and autonomous facts. Some things to discuss there: a priori vs a posteriori knowledge; analyticity vs tautology; laws of logic; justification.
• I gave a definition of justification that said a belief is justified when there are good reasons to believe it. Reasons are answers to why questions. I also said explanations are answers to why questions too, and so reasons and explanations are connected. (On one reading of 'reason', reasons are more internal, something the self is aware of. On a reading of 'explanation', explanations are external, existing independently of someone's awareness. There's an explanation for why fire is hot even if no one knows it. But there is an externalist reading of reasons too.)
• This means there's probably some way to reconcile explanationism—the view that knowledge is when you believe something because it's true—with the view that justification is based on reasons.
• Both explanationism and justification-by-reasons can probably be reconciled with some kind of foundationalism, and indeed might depend on some kind of foundationalism. I'm aware that Huemer is a foundationalist. I find the view attractive, as alternatives like skepticism and coherentism seem mistaken.

Intellectual Virtue #1 - Joe Schmid on Intellectual Virtue

The Majesty of Reason (2020)

 

"Tribalism is the dogmatic and weaponized adherence to the principles and beliefs of a social, political, or ideological group." (7)

 

"Tribalism underpins so many of the problems plaguing humanity. The devaluation and systematic murder of religious, social, and racial groups in parts of the world is fueled by the dehumanization of those outside one's ideological tribe. Tribalism is no trivial matter; its pernicious effects are witnessed on scales ranging from interpersonal communication to systematic genocide." (7)

 

"There is no doubt that the ingrained shortcomings of human nature are partially responsible for this tribalism." (7)

 

"We have lost sight of the very purpose for which dialogue and discussion exist in the first place, the very treasure upon which we base our intellectual pursuits: truth." (8)

 

"Without a recognition that truth is our aim, we see interlocutors not as fellow explorers on a journey towards a common treasure, but as villains with whom we must compete to gain status, pride, and ego-gratification." (8)

 

"Rather than fundamentally alter human nature, then, as an antidote to this dire ideological situation, the solution is a mutual recognition that we are fellow explorers who can learn from one another and seek the beautiful treasure of truth together as an enterprise of curiosity, respect, and love. It is only through valuing and loving others, encouraging critical and reflective thought, and aiming ourselves toward truth that we can solve the polarizing problems afflicting humanity." (8)

 

"How do we, as explorers, as seekers, proceed on this journey? . . . The first step on our journey lays the foundation for the ensuing steps. It equips you with the intellectual virtues and conversational tactics necessary for critical thinking. . . . Without cultivating the dispositions of curiosity, humility, open-mindedness, a love for truth, and more, a proficiency in argumentation is groundless and without direction." (9)

 

"The foundation of critical thinking is virtue. Virtues are (i) stable traits or characteristics that (ii) one develops through acts, habits, and character formation with (iii) some intrinsically valuable telos (end, purpose, goal). A morally virtuous person consistently strives for the telos of moral perfection through continued action and habituation towards doing good and avoiding evil. An intellectually virtuous person consistently strives for truth and greater understanding through various habits of the mind – intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, and so on." (11) (Emphasis in bold is mine.)

 

"Here is a brief survey of some of the most important intellectual virtues that will serve as the foundation for the rest of the book (and, hopefully, for the rest of your life)." (11)

 

Emphasis in bold is mine in the following quotes: 

 

"Being intellectually humble involves recognizing the limitations of your knowledge and abilities. . . . intellectual humility is the willingness to say 'I don't know,' . . . and 'I might be wrong' in the appropriate circumstances." (11)

 

"Intellectual curiosity refers to the flaming passion . . . one has for discovering truths . . ." (11)

 

". . . intellectual perseverance is a committed rejection of intellectual laziness. Those with intellectual perseverance see barriers, hardships, and obstacles in their intellectual life as challenges to be overcome and opportunities for growth. Instead of giving up their pursuit of truth when it gets tough, they dig even deeper into the issues . . ." (12)

 

"Developing intellectual responsibility is a matter of taking charge of your pursuit of truth. Intellectually responsible individuals try to minimize deferring their beliefs to the hands of authority figures; instead, they seek to equip themselves with justification, arguments, evidence, and reasons." (12)

 

"Being open-minded is not a matter of believing that every single alternative position is equally probable. On the contrary, it is the willingness to examine such alternative positions in order to critically evaluate their rational and evidential merit. Being open-minded is all about a willingness to consider alternative viewpoints and to recognize, where appropriate, that one's own position might be mistaken." (12)

 

"We are all susceptible to confirmation bias – the tendency to selectively attend to . . . evidence that support[s] . . . our pre-existing beliefs and downplay . . . evidence that contravene[s] them. But a genuine love – dare I say adoration – for truth can help combat confirmation bias. Don't make defending a position your primary aim in intellectual pursuits; instead, make discovering truth your foremost goal." (12-13)

 

Schmid goes on to give us tips for productive conversation. He writes,

 

"Intellectual virtues are, once again, the foundation of critical thinking. However, they provide little guidance on how to have productive, fruitful, truth-oriented conversations . . . Intellectual virtues are all about directing oneself . . . to the telos of truth. But conversations are a step beyond that, since they implicate others in the pursuit of truth. Intellectual virtues are about action; conversations are about interaction." (13)

 

He continues: 

 

"It stands to reason, then, that the intellectual virtues will be limited in their utility when it comes to conversations. For this reason, I've compiled a number of tips . . . useful in facilitating the productive exchange of ideas." (13)

 

I will briefly paraphrase the 22 tips given (note that when I give verbatim quotes I am not necessarily quoting the entire tip):

 

1) Don't judge people for being biased for their current views. Work to mitigate bias, but don't view it as a personal failing when bias is a universal feature of human nature.

 

2) Emphasize agreement over disagreement.

 

3) Recognize that you and your interlocutor are on the same team with the shared goal of getting closer to the truth.

 

Question: This is not always the case. If you suspect that a person is not a genuine truthseeker, what do you do then? Avoid conversation with them? In some cases that's impossible, such as when confronted by friends and family on issues. Folks who lack intellectual virtue are, by all appearances, not truthseekers. I suppose the only thing to do then is preach the good news of intellectual virtue. If that doesn't go anywhere then there's no point in conversation at that point.

 

4) Be prepared to learn from your interlocutor. Don't enter a conversation expecting only to show off your superior knowledge.

 

5) Say you don't know something when you don't know it.

 

I would add: It's okay to use language like: "I'm aware of X topic / idea / author / book / paper, but I still need to research it and think more about it." Or, "While such and such is not clear, these other things are clear, and we can deal with the unclear stuff later."

 

That way you don't let your ignorance just hang awkwardly in the air; you acknowledge it and acknowledge a path forward for how you can deal with that ignorance, and acknowledge the bits of knowledge you do have around the gaps. You can also refocus the conversation and say "I don't know X or such and such is not yet clear, but that's not relevant to the task at hand." 

 

6) "It's okay . . . to be certain on some positions, but it should be somewhat rare." (14)

 

I have wondered whether one could make sense of a certain view of certainty where you can be certain and yet still open to changing your mind. The default view is that if you are certain then that just means you are not open to having your mind changed. But on another view of certainty, to say I am certain of something is just to say that I currently cannot imagine being wrong about that thing. I'm willing to entertain arguments for an opposing view because maybe they will change my imagination.

 

This way you get to have it both ways: you can be both certain and open-minded. Example: I am certain that if you have two objects, and combine them with two more objects, then you will have four objects. I cannot imagine this not being the case. But if someone believes differently (say, a nominalist who believes that truthmaker maximalism is false and that there are no truthmakers for mathematical statements), then I'm willing to hear them out because they might change my imagination.

 

7) Create a respectful environment where truth and love take center stage.

 

8) Place yourself in the shoes of your interlocutor and humanize them, and try to take on their point of view to better understand why they believe as they do.

 

9) "Ditch the caricatures."(14) Don't let stereotypes affect the way you treat your interlocutor. Here I think of how Christians can be stereotyped as ignorant and irrational, and atheists can be stereotyped as selfish and evil.

 

Does this mean Christians have to reject Romans 1 when dialoguing with atheists? 

 

NRSVUE: "18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse . . ."

 

How can Christians "ditch the caricature" when the Bible itself caricatures atheists? "God has made it plain to them"? "they are without excuse"? Also, it's straight up false that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth." If we take this meaning more generally, how much propaganda, lying, deception at the hands of businesses and governments has gone unpunished? There is a lot of suppression of truth out there, but I don't see one iota of God's wrath.

 

10) Avoid echo chambers and immerse yourself in varying viewpoints and ways of thinking.

 

11) Focus the conversation on exploring ideas rather than exposing the mistakes of your interlocutor's view. Your goal should be discovering what's true, not "defeating" an opponent.

 

12) Try not to score points or "win" a debate. Instead, aim for mutual understanding.

 

13) Modify your language to deescalate tension. I would add: avoid accusatory statements, which often begin with the word "you." Instead, use "I" statements and focus on what you believe and why. Try to avoid placing your interlocutor on the defensive or making them feel attacked.

 

14) Be virtuous and aim for truth and love.

 

15) "Try not to sew your worldview or position into the very fabric of your own being. Your value is not tied to the positions you take. If you can (at least temporarily) separate yourself from the position you take, arguments against the position in question won't be seen or felt as personal attacks." (16)

 

a) I can imagine keeping a distance to the odd philosophical argument or position. It's harder to imagine keeping a distance to your entire worldview. But that is exactly what's required – after all, your worldview could be mistaken, and to test your worldview you must step outside of it and subject it to critique as if an outsider.

 

However, there are some positions that cannot be separated from the self. The view that there is a self, for example, which is a (surprisingly) controversial view, cannot, as far as I can see, be separated from the self.

 

b) I would argue that your value is tied to the positions you take, which is exactly why so much is at stake in philosophy of religion discussions. Our value is at stake! If I am an immortal being who will live forever in a blissful heavenly realm, then my value is infinite. But if I am a mortal being who dies and stays dead forever, then my value is finite. [This is why there is so much at stake in metaethical discussions too! Some folks argue against value realism. –01 July 2025]

 

16) Be a good listener and be fully present and not distracted. "If the occasion is right, re-state the point made by your dialectical partner. This shows that you are genuinely listening to them, which de-escalates tribalism. Also be sure to ask, respectfully, 'Is this what you mean?'" (16)

 

17) Philosophy is best done slowly. I would add: it's okay to go over the same concepts, ideas, and arguments over and over again in philosophy. In philosophy ideas are worth revisiting time and time again. There's always something to add or correct.

 

18) Steelman, don't strawman. I would add: this is what it means to place yourself in your interlocutor's shoes and try to see things from their point of view. This is also known as charity, where you interpret your interlocutor's position in the best of lights. Defeating a strawman means nothing. It's only when a view, in its best form, is shown to be mistaken that you can rationally reject it.

 

19) Speaking of charity, be charitable! How extremely frustrating is it when someone construes your words to mean something horrible that you didn't mean? Don't do that.

 

20) Maintain civility and respect. If this cannot be done, then walk away from the conversation.

 

21) Do not psychologize your interlocutor. 'Psychologizing' refers to when you try to explain why someone believes what they do by psychoanalysis. This involves dismissing the reason and evidence given for their view.

 

Recently I saw an example of this mistake made by Lee Strobel, where in an interview he talked about how famous atheists had poor relationships with their fathers, suggesting that we can psychologize atheism away as a result of "daddy issues". This is a mistake because it ignores the very real arguments that atheists, and naturalists more broadly, have offered for atheism and naturalism, arguments that Lee Strobel certainly has not come close to defeating.

 

I think psychologizing is perfectly fine, and even necessary for explaining human behavior and belief. Where it becomes a "fallacy" is when the psychoanalysis is just straight up wrong. If an atheist is convinced that the problem of evil succeeds, then the correct psychoanalysis will involve the intellectual experience provided by an argument from evil.

 

Atheists make this mistake too: they will say that Christians believe what they do because of wishful thinking. That fails to account for the fact that at least some Christians believe Christianity is true because they read the New Testament and are convinced that what they are reading is true history, that Jesus really did die and raise from the dead, that Paul really was visited by God on the road to Damascus, and that the authors of the New Testament accurately recorded what happened, at least accurately enough to justify a general Christian belief that God exists, sent Jesus to die for our sins, and resurrected Jesus as a sign of the resurrection to come for those who place their faith in Jesus. [In fact, you could accuse atheists of wishful thinking – wishing that they would not be judged by God for their moral failings. -01 July 2025]

 

I would add: one of the worst mistakes you can make as an interlocutor is, sadly, one of the most common mistakes, known as 'mindreading' or 'gaslighting' (this applies to psychologizing too), which is when you assume you know someone's inner mental life better than they do, or you assert yourself as a greater authority of someone's feelings and beliefs than they are. It can be a form of gaslighting because it involves trying to make someone appear confused about their own mental states; it basically amounts to an accusation of self-deception or failure of self-understanding. It's similar to "putting words in someone's mouth".

 

Christians can make this mistake because of Romans 1, which suggests that non-believers either really believe there is a God, as creation makes it obvious that God exists such that there is no excuse for non-belief, and that non-believers are somehow deceiving themselves or failing to be honest about why they really reject God, or non-believers are just really stupid (somehow in a way that morally implicates them).

 

Again, we see how the Bible gets in the way of being intellectually virtuous. This verse in particular is problematic. It appears to commit the Christian to engage in the worst mistake you can make in informal reasoning where you assume to know your interlocutor better than they know themselves.

 

22) "Arguments are not weapons and are rarely knock-down. Recognize room for rational disagreement." (17)

 

I agree that 1) you should never use arguments as weapons to attack someone or bully them or insult them, and 2) that arguments are rarely so strong that they guarantee the truth of the conclusion, because the premises can almost always be challenged. But I'm not sure there is always room for rational disagreement, depending on our definition of 'rational.'

 

Let's say I become convinced that arguments from evil succeed in showing that it's incredibly unlikely that a perfect God exists. It would be very strange for me to admit both that 1) God very likely doesn't exist and 2) There is no mistake in believing in God. If God likely doesn't exist then of course there is a mistake in believing in God.

 

If I believed in God and then stopped believing because of arguments and evidence, then clearly I am saying to myself that there are good reasons to doubt God's existence such that it would be irrational for me to continue believing. The "for me" caveat is key. Maybe it's consistent to say that it would be irrational for me to believe in God given what I believe about arguments from evil, but I don't have to believe that it's irrational for other people to believe in God because their beliefs don't commit them to the same conclusions as mine do.

 

However, surely I believe that the reasons why I have the beliefs I do, and thus the commitments I do, are good reasons, reasons worth having. Good reasons are, perhaps among other things, true. If someone says "I believe in God because God is necessary to make sense of the origin of consciousness, the universe, and biological life", those are only good reasons to believe if it is in fact true that God is necessary to make sense of those things. If those claims turn out to be false, then they turn out to not be good reasons.

 

Whether someone is rational, on one interpretation, comes down to whether that person has actually good reasons, and thus true reasons, for why they believe as they do. If we believe philosophy allows us to discover truth, then we should be prepared to say that philosophy allows us to discover which reasons were good or bad all along, and thus which positions were reasonable or unreasonable all along. If I change my mind on God's existence, then I am admitting that the reasons for believing in God were not good even while I believed. Those reasons turned out to not be good after all, which is why I later changed my mind and lost belief in God. It just sounds to me like a straight contradiction to say both that there are no good reasons to believe in God and that belief in God is rational.

 

There is this sense in which I wasn't irrational for believing in God: When I believed in God, I wasn't believing out of wishful thinking (actually, I think that was a part of it, but not the whole story), but I was believing out of what makes sense and what I thought must be true. I thought that the idea of the world being a total accident didn't make sense and that therefore there had to be a creator. That is, in a sense, a reasonable view. I was believing on the basis of arguments, in an intellectually virtuous way, which made it more likely that I would be believing what's true or at least capable of uncovering and correcting my false beliefs.

 

I agree that there is room for rational disagreement in this sense, in the sense that you can't blame someone for believing as they do. More specifically, you can acknowledge problematic, intellectually vicious ways of believing (these are, in a sense, blameworthy) in contrast to reliable, intellectually virtuous (blameless) ways of believing. You can acknowledge that there are intellectually virtuous (blameless) people on opposing sides of a debate. But that doesn't mean one side isn't more reasonable at the end of the day. What we are trying to discover is exactly that: which side is the one with better reasons to believe. Just because you are blameless doesn't mean you are not ignorant or mistaken.

 

The problem is that 'irrational' is so often used as an insult. So for the sake of productive conversations, it's best to never accuse someone of being irrational, or to accuse someone's view as an irrational view. Instead it's best to focus on reasons: I believe such and such because... and "What reasons do you have for thinking that that must be true?"