An edited extract from Bridges,D. (2003) ‘Fiction written under oath?' Essays in philosophy and educational research , Dordrecht , Kluwer (with kind permission of the author)
…. the argument is that we are morally accountable for the way we come to hold our beliefs and the way in which we continue to hold and advance them. Consequently we criticise people for the way in which they arrive at their beliefs – “ we blame a person who makes hasty generalisations or who ignore the testimony of reliable authority” (Zagzebski 1996 p 5). Similarly, “when people call others shortsighted or pigheaded, their criticism is as much like moral criticism as when they call them offensive or obnoxious; in fact what is obnoxious about a person can sometimes be limited to a certain pattern of thinking…” (ibid pp5-6). Even in ordinary life we offer moral critique of prejudiced, unwarranted and unfair beliefs as well as behaviour; of one person's failure to look at the facts of a case before jumping to condemn another; of careless, inaccurate or even dishonest reporting of events; of an unwillingness to listen to someone else's argument or to engage in any self criticism or questioning. A fortiori in the context of a life professionally focussed on the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, such behaviours and traits of character invite particular (moral) condemnation and in extreme cases dismissal.
Conversely, those are deemed particularly worthy of esteem, who display in full measure such intellectual virtues and behaviours as: careful attention to argument and evidence; thoroughness; honesty; humility with regard to one's own knowledge and respectfulness with regard to the knowledge claims of others; responsiveness to criticism; perseverance.
There are of course many candidates for the canon of intellectual virtues. For Dewey the ‘attitudes' to be encouraged included open-mindedness, wholeheartedness and responsibility (Dewey 1933). For Hume they included: wisdom, a capacious memory, keenness of insight, eloquence, prudence, penetration, discernment and discretion (Hume 1983). For Montmarquet (1986, 1993) there are three clusters of virtue: intellectual impartiality, or openness to the ideas of others; intellectual sobriety i.e. the virtues of the careful enquirer who accepts only what is warranted by relevant reasons evidence and argument; and intellectual courage, which includes perseverance and determination. I cannot help but observe how much more elevated is the discourse of intellectual virtue than the discourse of ‘key skills' which government has been energetically encouraging the universities to espouse.
Aristotle attached importance to the distinction between intellectual virtue and broader moral virtue, claiming that virtues such as courage and temperance differ in nature from such qualities as wisdom and understanding (though courage and temperance may of course play an important part in the conduct of educational or any other research and are hardly disassociated from intellectual virtue). Neither Spinoza nor Hume accepted this distinction; nor arguably (see Moravcsik 1992) did Plato. Among contemporary discussions Zagsebski (1996) has argued, I think persuasively, that “intellectual virtues ought to be treated as a sub-set of the moral virtues in the Aristotelian sense of the latter” (p139). He argues that, “although there are some rough differences in the degree to which these two kinds of virtue involve strong feelings and desires,…an intellectual virtue does not differ from certain moral virtues any more than one moral virtue differs from another, that the processes related to the two kinds of virtue do not function independently, and that it greatly distorts the nature of both to attempt to analyze them in separate branches of philosophy. Intellectual virtues are best viewed as forms of moral virtue” (Zagzebski 1996 p 139).
I am not sure how crucial to my present argument is the successful elision of moral and intellectual virtue. The basic point is that there are certain clearly ethical or moral principles like honesty which are a general requirement of good living but a sine qua non of decent intellectual endeavour. There are other particular requirements of decent intellectual endeavour (perseverence, careful attention to reasons argument and evidence, open-mindedness, respect for the opinion of others etc) which are also arguably important pre-requisites of a more broadly moral life. Like Zagzebski, I see little value in trying to draw a sharp distinction between principles which underpin both intellectual and more broadly moral virtue. But these principles and the virtuous behaviour which they demand are significant not just in terms of the quality of individual existence that they support or in terms of the kinds of relations with other people which they permit: they have in addition a function related to a desired end, which in this case is something like the successful development of knowledge and understanding. More strongly, as Sosa put it, “an intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximise one's surplus of truth over error” (Sosa 1985 p228).
Interestingly, this is a line of argument which suggests that in or along with our programmes of ‘research training', which typically have a focus on methods of research and the developing of technique, we should be considering how and where we are contributing not just to an understanding of the ethics of research (which again typically focuses on the researcher's obligations to participants and stakeholders) but the cultivation of intellectual virtue and to those qualities which help to transform the mere possession of information and the apparatus of enquiry and criticism into something closer to wisdom.
