Responsibility, epistemic virtues and moral virtues

Lecture 4 (March 23) continued the assessment of the responsibilityist axis of virtue epistemology, by clarifying the position defended by L. Zagzebski in Virtues of the Mind [1], for whom knowledge, like justified belief, is founded in intellectual virtues pincipally linked to the character of the agent. To better understand the acute nature of the difficulties posed by any analysis wishing to claim the possible division of virtues into intellectual and moral virtues, and then the reduction of the latter to the former, we recalled D. Hume's pertinent reflections in Appendix 4 of Investigations into the Principles of Morals. After presenting Zagzebski's arguments in favor of the idea that the intellectual virtues could be considered a mere subset of the moral virtues, we clarified the difficulties of this position, and began to put forward some elements of our own approach.

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