Believing as We Should: Essays on Good Intellectual Conduct, Classical and Contemporary

The following collection of essays is intended to address questions pertaining to what it means to believe well. There are many branches of philosophy through which we might approach this question, but the essays comprising this collection are each concentrated in one of three specific areas of philosophy, namely, ancient philosophy, ethics of belief, and virtue epistemology. The intention of bringing together essays from these (perhaps unusually disparate) areas is to provide the reader with a richer and more comprehensive understanding of how both contemporary and ancient philosophers attempted to answer questions not only about what sorts of believers we ought to be—that is, what kinds of doxastic conduct we ought to maintain or intellectual character traits we ought to possess—but also what specific kinds of content our beliefs should (or should not) contain. By examining these issues through the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophical perspectives, we may gain a more thorough understanding of what it means for a person to be a good (or bad) intellectual agent. Essay 1, “The Viability of Feminist Stoicism: On the Compatibility of Stoic and Feminist Epistemology”: This paper examines whether central tenets of Stoic epistemology and feminist epistemology can be reconciled in such a way as to support the possibility of a feminist Stoic epistemology, and consequently a feminist Stoic philosophical theory. While some scholars (Hill, Nussbaum, Aikin and McGill-Rutherford) suggest that the Stoics hold proto-feminist ethical views, they have neglected to consider whether Stoicism is compatible with feminist epistemology. This essay argues that Stoic epistemology, especially their conception of the cognitive impression, the connection between knower and impression, and the adverse relationship between emotion and knowledge, is antithetical to key concepts in feminist epistemology, such as situated knowledge and standpoint theory (Anderson, Grasswick, Tanesini). The Stoics’ deemphasis of the agent’s gender in her role as a knower—often interpreted as a detached, objective, and egalitarian “view from nowhere”—is inconsistent with feminist epistemology; thus, this paper maintains that a fully satisfactory “feminist Stoicism” is untenable. Essay 2, “Inside Thoughts: Some Problems with Doxastic Wronging”: This paper gives three novel arguments against the recent, influential account of doxastic wronging from Basu and Schroeder, which involves three parts: (1) doxastic wrongs are directed; (2) doxastic wrongs are committed by the belief itself; and (3) doxastic wrongs wrong in virtue of the belief’s content. First, I argue that a problem arises from the “privacy of the doxastic sphere”— because we lack access to the doxastic sphere of others barring some expression or action performed by the believer, it is impossible to incontrovertibly locate the wronging in the belief rather than some subsequent action. Second, I deny that doxastic wrongs are a type of directed wrong. Directed wrongs typically involve an autonomy infringement or wellbeing reduction; however, the doxastic sphere is isolated from the interpersonal interactions and exchanges that could result in those autonomy infringements or wellbeing reductions. Third, I elucidate some problematic consequences of identifying the belief’s content as the wrong-making feature, as this counter-intuitively implies that two agents who hold a belief with the same content but have radically different attitudes or dispositions—such as a member of a hate group and a social justice activist—both commit doxastic wrongs against the object of their belief. Essay 3, “Intellectual Virtue without Epistemic Success”: This paper studies the relationship between intellectual virtue and the successful acquisition of knowledge. Leading contemporary virtue epistemologists (Sosa, Zagzebski) maintain that reliable and regular success at acquiring knowledge or true belief is a required component of intellectual virtue. I refer to this as ‘the success condition’. Satisfying the success condition is deemed necessary for virtue possession and qualification as an intellectually virtuous person. Furthermore, intellectually virtuous persons are frequently considered to be those with high degrees of epistemic success at achieving high-grade (high-value) knowledge. I argue that these theories fail to consider the epistemic impact of structural injustice and oppression (specifically educational inequality) and thus generate recurrent misevaluations of intellectually virtuous persons. Oppressed persons may regularly fail to satisfy the success condition (or satisfy it to the same degree as non-oppressed persons), while still meeting an intuitive standard for intellectual virtue possession. I conclude that the misevaluations of persons generated by the success condition necessitate a new approach and a new theory of intellectual virtue.

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