Abstract
For Julia Driver, some virtues involve ignorance. Modesty, for example, is a disposition to underestimate self-worth, and blind charity is a disposition not to see others’ defects. Such “virtues of ignorance,” she argues, serve as counterexamples to the Aristotelian view that virtue requires intellectual excellence. But Driver seems to face a dilemma: if virtues of ignorance involve ignorance of valuable knowledge, then they do not merit virtue status; but if they involve ignorance of trivial knowledge, then they do not preclude intellectual excellence. So, either there are no virtues of ignorance, or there are no virtues of ignorance – at least not the sort of ignorance that precludes intellectual excellence. Virtues of ignorance therefore fail as counterexamples to Aristotelian virtue theory.
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Notes
For a recent defense of the view that ignorance just is lacking knowledge, see Le Morvan (2011, 2012). For criticisms, see Peels (2012) and Pritchard (forthcoming).
For some, knowing full well evokes Ernest Sosa’s (2011) work, but I only mean to contrast an epistemic standing with the ignorance possessed by the Driverian modest person, who is ignorant to some extent.
John Locke similarly argued that “superficial and slight…observations that contain nothing of moment in themselves…should be lightly passed by, and never thought worth our searching after” (1996, p. 222).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to draw out and address this point.
Duncan Pritchard argues that lacking trivial knowledge does not even count as ignorance, properly understood, and that “one manifests one’s rationality as an inquirer…precisely by not seeking out…trivial truths” (forthcoming, his emphasis).
As noted, Driver thinks that modesty is valuable, in part, on account of (externally valuable) good consequences it systematically produces for others (e.g., easing jealousies). It might be thought that in omitting that feature of her view here I am failing to give a full response to the objection I just considered. But recall that this is Driver’s non-neutral claim about the value of virtues. She has no recourse to this feature of her view in arguing for an externalist position on the value of virtues. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for persuading me to mention this point here, too.
Note, for example, Zagzebski’s (1996, pp. 166–168) reluctance to mark a clear distinction between intellectual and moral virtue. Michael Brady (2018) and Alan Wilson (2017) mark such a distinction, but their views assume that virtues require intellectual and motivational excellence (Brady), or just motivational excellence (Wilson). Both views are inherently internalist in the relevant sense.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for persuading me to address this objection further.
Relatedly, epistemic defect is a normative notion. As Christine Swanton argues, “what counts as [epistemic] defect is at least in part determined by moral considerations” (2003, p. 535).
For another problem for Driver’s distinction between moral and intellectual virtue, one which presses the egoistic implications of Driver’s account of intellectual virtue, see Carter and Church (2016).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to address this objection.
Wilson (2016, p. 78) offers a similar argument.
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Acknowledgements
I thank James K. Johnson, Robert Kelly, Oscar Piedrahita Rivera, Duncan Pritchard, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Dolin, J. A Dilemma for Driver on Virtues of Ignorance. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 889–898 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10110-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10110-2