The Myth of a Pure Virtue Epistemology

G. E. M. Anscombe’s trenchant critique of consequentialist and deontological moral theories helped bring virtues back into moral philosophy.1 Ethicists committed to consequentialist or deontological frameworks gave virtues renewed attention by developing theories of moral virtue that assimilated virtue into their prior and more fundamental moral commitments.2 Others, rather than assimilating moral virtue, developed a pure virtue ethic that gives virtue and related aretaic notions of excellence and admirability a fundamental role in one’s moral framework. Some pure virtue ethicists address the traditional problems and questions (e.g., giving an account of right action) asked by consequentialists and deontologists, some argue that there is something flawed or importantly deficient with these traditional projects and questions addressed by the other moral frameworks. Virtue epistemology has experienced similar developments since Ernest Sosa’s “The Raft and the Pyramid.”3 Some virtue epistemologists offer theories of intellectual virtue that assimilate virtue into some more fundamental epistemic framework (e.g., reliabilism or evidentialism). Some, however, argue for a pure virtue epistemology that takes intellectual virtues as personally excellent or admirable intellectual character traits analogous to Aristotelian moral virtues, which purportedly play a fundamental role in one’s epistemic framework. As in the moral realm, some pure virtueepistemic