Teaching Intellectual Virtues, Changing Attitudes

Abstract

This chapter discusses the prospects of interventions designed to weaken epistemic vices and promote virtues. The first section discusses the prospects of two strategies for the cultivation of intellectual virtues. These are: explicit education and the habituation of virtue. It concludes that both strategies encounter obstacles that make their success unlikely. The second section is dedicated to attempts to foster virtue by stimulating emulation when in the presence of role models or exemplars. It argues that despite its current popularity, and evidence of some success when educating cohorts of children, this strategy is unlikely on its own to be very effective for those who are most in need of virtue education. The third section describes self-affirmation techniques consisting in the affirmation of values and offers indirect empirical evidence that indicates that the self-affirmation strategy might be successful when trying to reduce the expression of vicious behaviour, and over time, might even lead to the development of more virtuous conduct.