The Table Video

For many people, the notions of intellectual character and intellectual virtue are foreign and technical seeming. However, Jason Baehr argues that they are especially useful for addressing a familiar breakdown of civility in contemporary public discourse. Drawing on recent work in virtue epistemology, he begins with an overview of the concepts of intellectual character, intellectual virtues, and intellectual vices. Next he argues that an intellectual virtues and vices conceptual framework can play an important role in diagnosing and responding to the problem of incivility. Finally, he considers several objections to my argument.

Transcript:

First, just let me say thank you to the Center for Christian Thought, and to Tom, and Greg, and Steve, and to the Templeton Foundation for the opportunity to be talking to you today. It’s an honor to be speaking alongside a number of people who’ve, some of whom aren’t aware of it, have really played a formative role in my own intellectual development. So again, thank you, and pleased to be here. I will be talking today about something that you could consider to be basically a project in what I would call applied virtue of histimology.

Like Greg said, I work in the area of virtue of histimology. And virtue of histimology is the philosophical, it’s an approach to the philosophical study of knowledge that gives a central role to intellectual virtues and their role in the intellectual life. And my claim today will be, and I’m sorry, but I’m gonna have to turn around, because I do have my glasses on, but I can barely see what’s up there. So I’m gonna have to go back and forth a little bit here. My claim is that virtue of histimology can provide an illuminating diagnosis of an eminent problem of incivility in contemporary public discourse, and that it contains resources for addressing this problem, or addressing this deficiency.

So I’m basically going to be applying virtue of histimology to our understanding of what’s happening in public discourse. And in some ways, my thesis is not very controversial. In fact, I think once we kind of get to it, it hopefully will strike you as fairly obvious. But the reason that it might not be obvious now is that most of us don’t have an informed, robust conception of what intellectual character or intellectual virtues and vices are. So roughly the first half of the talk will be kind of an introduction to these ideas, ‘kay?

A few things about what I’m not claiming. I’m not claiming that incivility in public discourse is a new phenomenon, nor am I claiming that it’s especially worse in every respect today than it has been in times past, arguably, in certain respects, it’s been much worse than it is today. Nor am I trying to defend a definition of what civility or incivility are. And in keeping with that, I’m also not proposing that intellectual virtues are the entirety of what it is for us to engage with each other in a civil matter, nor that intellectual vices, as we’ll talk about in a moment, are the entirety of incivility in public discourse. And this underscores kind of the modest character, in a way, of what I’m trying to argue. So let’s get to talking about intellectual virtues and vices.

As I’m thinking about them, intellectual virtues are just the character traits of a good inquirer, or you could say, of a good thinker or a good learner, or you could say they’re the character traits of a lover of truth, or a truth seeker. And intellectual vices, then, are the defects or the qualities, the character traits of a defective or a poor inquirer, or thinker, or learner, or truth seeker. So, to try to bring that into focus, I invite you to think for a moment about kind of what in general are the qualities of a good inquirer, or of good inquiry? And if you were to sort of step back and think about, okay, what would an ideal inquirer look like.

One of the the first things you probably think about would be general intelligence, okay, sort of raw intellectual ability. A good inquirer, the ideal inquirer, would have a high level of general intelligence. But beyond that, you might point out that to be a good inquirer also requires having a certain degree of just sort of domain specific, foundational knowledge or background knowledge. If you don’t know anything about science or philosophy or politics, you’re not gonna be good at inquiring or seeking the truth in those areas. Third, you might notice or, that good inquiry also typically involves certain intellectual skills.

This includes just basic intellectual skills like the ability to read, to write, to make logical inferences. It might also include, again, certain skills that are narrower and more specific to whatever area you are inquiring about. Notice, though, that this is an incomplete list. And that it is is evident in the fact that a person can be highly intelligent, knowledgeable, and skilled while also being intellectually lazy, arrogant, aggressive, careless, hasty, superficial, closed minded, fearful, dishonest, quick to give up, that is, while still failing to be a good or excellent inquirer on the whole.

Notice that all of those qualities that I’ve just drawn attention to are robustly volitional, or characterological. They are defects of personal character. They’re dispositions to act, think, and feel poorly in the context of inquiry. What that suggests, then, is that good inquiry has a volitional, or a characterological dimension. And when I’m talking about intellectual virtues, I’m just talking about the characterological side of thinking or inquiring well.

A few examples, curiosity is a matter of asking thoughtful and insightful questions. Intellectual autonomy is an ability to think and form beliefs for oneself. Intellectual humility is being aware of our intellectual limitations, and being willing to acknowledge, or to own, or to take responsibility for them. Open mindedness is a matter of being able to take up an alternative point of view, and to give it a fair and an honest hearing. And intellectual courage involves subjecting oneself to risk or potential harm in the pursuit of epistemic goods, and by epistemic goods, I mean things like knowledge, truth, understanding.

Okay, so I wanna suggest that this idea of intellectual character and intellectual virtues and vices, though it’s not something that philosophers or psychologists have talked a lot about as such, at least until recently, it’s something that people have been aware of, at some level, for quite a long time. So going back as far, even to Plato’s Republic, where in the second half of that work, Plato is unpacking sort of the mind of the philosopher, and the mind of the philosopher for him is the basis of moral virtue and moral excellence. And here’s what he has to say at one point about that type of mind, he says, “The one who is willing to taste every kind of learning “with gusto, and who approaches learning “with delight, and is insatiable, “we shall justly assert to be a philosopher.” Aristotle, in a famous passage in his book called the Metaphysics says, “All men by nature desire to know. ”

An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses. “For even apart from their usefulness, “they are loved for themselves, “and above all others, the sense of sight. “The reason is that this,” this sight, this sense, “most of all the senses, makes us know “and bring to life many differences between things.” Think about the dimensions of personal psychology that Plato and Aristotle are drawing attention to here.

Again, my suggestion is that they’re calling attention to something that is personal, something that has a strong volitional dimension, something that has an affective component, it consists partly of how you feel, and yet it’s not moral character so much that they’re calling attention to. Rather, it’s a kind of epistemically oriented, truth oriented dimension of personal psychology or personal character. So though they didn’t talk about intellectual character or intellectual virtues in the way that I am, at least, they were sensitive to it and were interested in it.

Similarly, here’s a quote from Descartes, in his course on method, he says, “Our opinions differ not because some of us “are more reasonable than others, “but solely because we take our thoughts “along different paths and don’t attend to the same things. “For it isn’t enough to have a good mind, what makes,” or excuse me, “what matters most is using it well. “Shear quality of intellect doesn’t make “the difference between good and bad. “The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices “as well as the greatest virtues. “Nor is nimbleness of intellect “the key to making discoveries. “Those who go very slowly, but always on the right path “can make much greater progress “than those who sprint and go astray.”

Again, he’s calling attention to the characterological, the volitional dimensions of the intellectual life, of inquiry, of seeking after truth, knowledge, and understanding. Now for our psychologist friends, fast forwarding to the, I guess this is, yes, the 21st century, you also see some evidence of concern with what I’m calling intellectual character and intellectual virtues in, among other areas, the area known as positive psychology.

So in the important, well known work by Peterson and Seligman entitled Character Strengths and Virtues, a Handbook and Classification, they devote five chapters to what they call strengths of character that pertain to wisdom and knowledge. And the qualities they discuss here are creativity, curiosity, open mindedness, love of learning, perspective, which they think of in terms of wisdom. So again, traces of concern with intellectual character and intellectual virtues from ancient times up to the present, even though it’s not always put in those terms, or in that language.

I wanna turn now to address a question you might have, which is, how are intellectual virtues, as I’ve just described them, related to what we typically think of as moral virtues. You might wonder, can you really draw a line between the two sets of qualities? You might’ve noticed that we used some of the same terms to refer to both, intellectual courage, we might talk about intellectual generosity.

So you might think, “Look, aren’t intellectual virtues “really just moral virtues applied to an epistemic context?” For instance, to the context of truth seeking or inquiry. I have four quick replies to this. And they’re kind of two pairs of replies. The first reply has to do with how individual intellectual virtues line up with individual moral virtues, okay? And the first thing I want to say is that, look, I certainly don’t have any objection to the claim that, for instance, intellectual courage, or intellectual patience, or intellectual generosity just are courage, generosity, patience in general applied to an epistemic context, applied to the context of inquiry.

So, I would agree that intellectual courage and moral courage are gonna have the same kind of basic structure, similarly for intellectual patience and intellectual generosity. So I’m not drawing a hard and fast distinction between intellectual virtues and moral virtues, at least in that sense. However, it is kind of interesting to note that intellectual virtues and moral virtues don’t line up perfectly. Note, for instance, that a paradigm moral vice, malevolence, ill will, right, doesn’t correspond to any paradigm intellectual vice. When you look at lists of intellectual vices, you don’t typically see intellectual malevolence anywhere on them, right? Similarly, note that a paradigm intellectual virtue, something like curiosity or inquisitiveness, doesn’t correspond to any paradigm moral virtue.

We don’t talk about moral curiosity, or moral inquisitiveness, at least not as a familiar virtue. So while the two sets of traits are intertwined and similar in lots of ways, it’s not as if you can just take the standard list of moral virtues, put the word intellectual in front of all of them, and have a complete list of intellectual virtues. The second pair of points I wanna make about the relationship between intellectual virtues and moral virtues concerns intellectual virtues kind of as a class, or as an entire group. You might wonder, aren’t moral virtues just sort of a sub, excuse me, aren’t intellectual virtues just sort of a subset or sub class of moral virtues? That’s a complicated, thorny, ambiguous question.

But here’s one sense in which I’d be happy to say yes, or answer affirmatively that question. If you think of the moral, or of morality broad enough, so, for instance, that it includes all of human flourishing, and if you think that part of what it is to flourish as a human being is to grow intellectually in knowledge and understanding, to form true beliefs, to contemplate the way reality, the world is, if you think morality or the moral extends that broadly, and if you think the human flourishing involves a kind of department or dimension that is epistemic in nature, then I’d be happy to say sure, intellectual virtues are just a subset of moral virtues, they’re that subset of moral virtues that aim at the epistemic dimensions of human flourishing.

However, I wouldn’t want you to infer from that that the distinction between intellectual virtues and moral virtues is therefore, kind of unimportant. And one reason for that is that people can, in certain ways, excel in intellectual virtues without excelling in moral virtues, and the other way around. So really quickly, you can imagine a passionate scientist who is enthralled with reaching the truth and knowledge and understanding, and we can imagine that her love of truth motivates her to think in ways that are careful, and fair, and honest, and to persevere in her inquiries.

She might even have a real interest in her students’ understanding of whatever area of science, say, that she’s working in. So she might carefully tend to their intellectual development. However, that’s consistent with the possibility that she’s also cold and indifferent to her spouse, and her children, and her neighbors, and so forth, right? Now it seemed to be a case where she’s got some genuine intellectual virtues. And if you doubt that, just imagine that she has no interest in truth, that she’s sloppy and dogmatic, and careless in her thinking, right? No, she’s got some excellencies, but she doesn’t have the same level of moral virtue. And of course, you can go the other way around as well.

You can imagine a person who is high in what we’re used to thinking of as moral virtues, concern with social justice, a heart and serving of the down and out, a devoted friend and mother and spouse, but who really has no interest in knowledge, learning, truth, intellectual growth, and as a result tends to sort of think in ways that are sloppy and careless, and distort the truth, handle evidence poorly. Well, there you have a case of someone who’s high in what we normally think of as moral virtues, but who is relatively low in what we think of as intellectual virtues. So even if intellectual virtues are a subset of moral virtues, I think it’s important for us to preserve some kind of a distinction and pay attention to both, because again, you can have one without the other.

You can’t assume that well, if you’ve got this, you’re going to have, you got moral virtues, you’ll be set in the area of intellectual virtues. Okay, so, hopefully, you’re getting at least a somewhat of an idea of what intellectual character, virtues, and vices are. Enough so that we can turn to the main point that I wanna make in the presentation here. And again, that point can be broken down into the following two claims.

First, that intellectual vice language and concepts provide an illuminating diagnosis of an eminent deficiency of civility in contemporary public discourse. And corresponding to that, that intellectual virtue concepts suggest a promising antidote to this deficiency. So, I’ll start with the first claim. And the first thing I wanna do is just draw your attention to what I assume are some familiar behaviors in public discourse that are clearly relevant to considerations of civility.

And these are behaviors that occurred in areas like politics, traditional media, social media, and so forth. It’s a long list. I’ll read it quickly. Building up and tearing down straw-man representations of an opposing viewpoint, binary or black and white thinking, attributing vicious motives to an intellectual opponent, name calling, listening poorly, if at all, to the opposing side, a failure to check your facts, willful misinterpretations of others’ words or arguments, hiding, obscuring, or finessing the limitations or weaknesses of one’s own point of view, selective evidence gathering, biased reporting, sweeping and hasty generalizations, a failure to ask or to answer tough questions, making claims without sufficient evidence, relying on suspect authorities, dismissive treatment of opposing points of view, inability to comprehend the possibility of reasonable disagreement.

Again, I’m just hoping you’ll agree that these activities characterize a lot of public discourse. And hopefully you’ll agree that they’re problematic. The next point to make, then, is to observe that the attitudes and behaviors we’ve just called attention to, they are precisely characteristic of several intellectual vices. I’ve just given you descriptions of qualities like intellectual dishonesty, intellectual disrespect, disregard for truth, intellectual arrogance, dogmatism, narrow mindedness, closed mindedness, intellectual rigidity, intellectual carelessness, and intellectual cowardice.

Now, a reasonable response at this point might be, yeah, okay, so what? Yes, it does make sense to think of and to view a lot of what we see going on in public discourse in terms of some of these trade terms and concepts that I’ve just mentioned. So in order to show you why that matters, I want to emphasize what I think is illuminating about this way of thinking about some of what goes on in public discourse that contributes to a kind of incivility that’s familiar to most of us. First of all, the first point has to do with accuracy.

So here the idea is that some of these trade terms, like intellectual dishonesty or closed mindedness, they give us the language and the concepts to kind of pinpoint and to describe behavior that we see in a way that feels and looks and seems accurate. So one reason it’s useful to think about public discourse in terms of intellectual vices is just accuracy, okay? It provides fitting descriptions of the phenomenon. A second, oh, and notice that intellectual vice concepts are unique in that capacity, compared to say, with moral vice concepts.

So when you think about carelessness with evidence, right, or selective attention to certain details, right, or even if you think about kind of caricaturing a certain point of view, it’s not clear that that illustrates or manifests moral vices, all right? Moral vices don’t quite stick to some of the behavior that we’re talking about in quite the same way that intellectual vice concepts do, ‘kay? Secondly, I think that understanding some of the behaviors in question through an intellectual vices lens, it can help explain the evaluative status of some of these behaviors.

So I don’t know about you, but when I confront those behaviors, I kind of recoil at them, right? And I think, ah, there’s something significantly bad or wrong with this type of behavior. But if you just describe the behavior as sort of being careless with evidence, say, something like that, the badness of it, the evaluative status of it, is maybe hard to make sense of. Now, intellectual vices are defects of character. And they’re defects of character that prevent us from getting at the truth. So if we can understand some of the behaviors we’re talking about in public discourse in terms of intellectual vices, that can help us explain why the behavior is bad. It leads us astray from the truth, and it manifests bad character, bad intellectual character.

Relatedly, I think it can help us understand kind of the motivational basis of some of what we see going on in public discourse. Intellectual vices, you can think this is oversimplifying it a little bit, but you can think of intellectual vices as kind of emerging from a disregard for truth, an insufficient concern with truth or knowledge or understanding, okay? And so if the behavior that we see that I described a couple slides ago, if we can treat that as characteristic of intellectual vices, that can give us insight into, and there’s an if there, ’cause this isn’t thinking of pointing at the psychologist here, that’s an empirical claim.

If that behavior is manifesting intellectual vices, and isn’t just activity that looks like intellectual vices, but if it is manifesting intellectual vices, then this way of thinking about the behavior can help us understand kinda what’s going on at bottom there, and what’s going on seems to be a sort of insufficient attention to epistemic goods like truth, knowledge, and understanding. That can be important knowledge to have when it comes to thinking about, well, what can we do in response to incivility in public discourse?

If we know that it’s rooted in an insufficient concern with truth, well, that might open up, direct our thinking as to how we ought to respond to it. So I conclude, then, that intellectual vice concepts provide an illuminating and helpful, not simply trivially accurate, but an illuminating and helpful diagnosis of an evident deficiency of civility in public discourse. Now to the second claim, which was about intellectual virtues.

Here, the suggestion is that intellectual virtue concepts then point in the direction of a helpful antidote to incivility. And you can see, this just sort of falls out of the first point. If intellectually vicious behavior is part of the problem, then part of the solution will be intellectual, intellectually virtuous behavior, or intellectual virtues. So an antidote to a lot of the behavior that we described before would be qualities like intellectual honesty. Just ask yourself, how many of those behaviors would be possible if all parties to the debate had these qualities. Intellectual honesty, intellectual humility, open mindedness, fair mindedness, intellectual integrity, intellectual carefulness, intellectual thoroughness, intellectual respect, all right, these seem like a very plausible antidote to the problem.

But here again, I wanna head off the response which says, well yeah, okay, so what? Why is this an especially helpful or important or illuminating antidote? And here again I’ll focus on two points. First of all, by thinking of the antidote in terms of intellectual virtues, we’re able to tap into a rich tradition in philosophy, theology, psychology, that has to do with character development and character formation. It’s one thing to say, what we need is more intellectual virtue in public discourse.

It’s another thing to be able to say, and here is a rich history of thinking dating from the ancient times all the way up to the present that can help us understand how to administer this antidote, how to implement the solution. So thinking of civility, or an important part of civility in terms of intellectual virtues opens up certain resources about how to help people become more civil. Secondly, it opens up a solution that potentially has very broad application. Recall that intellectual virtues have an epistemic orientation.

They’re the character traits of a truth seeker. They flow from a love of knowledge, a love of understanding. Second of all, it should be obvious that intellectual virtues are really important to democratic participation. Having informed views, casting informed votes requires certain habits or traits of mind. That’s significant because what it suggests is that there’s an important connection between intellectual virtues on one hand and education, understood very broadly. We think of education as having a couple of primary aims. One is knowledge, another is good citizenship. There are others as well, all right? But if intellectual character traits, or excuse me, if intellectual virtues are the character traits that you need to be a good knowledge seeker, or knower, or inquirer, and they’re also character traits that you need in order to be a good citizen, what that suggests is the possibility of integrating a focus on intellectual character development with education, even public education.

So that’s another reason sort of that it might be helpful to think about the antidote of incivility at least partially in terms of intellectual virtues. Okay, at this point, I want to turn to an objection. It’s one that’s probably crossed some of your minds at this point, and it’s an objection that says, look, should we always be intellectually virtuous in the context of civil discourse? Aren’t some views, maybe a lot of views or arguments unworthy of intellectually virtuous consideration? Aren’t some views sort of epistemically beyond the payout? Just as a working example here, we can think of you can think the Flat Earth Society, you can think of various outrageous moral views, an example that pertains to a quote that I’ll get to in a minute would be a person who comes to your door and wants you to listen to their arguments for rounding up all the redheads in the world and putting them in concentration camps.

I apologize to any redheads that are here. And the first thing I wanna say in response to that is look, intellectual virtue doesn’t require that we be equally open minded to all views. Nor does it require that you have to be open minded to every single possible view that gets brought to your attention. I do think it requires that when a view is deemed worthy of appreciation, that we meet a certain standard in how we think about it and treat it.

For instance, that we treat it in a way that’s careful, honest, fair, attentive, and so forth. So in some ways, my thesis is entirely consistent with the idea, yes, there will be times in the context of public discourse where an open minded thoughtful consideration of another point of view won’t be appropriate. And the underlying reason or explanation for that on my view at least, is that a consideration of an opposing viewpoint is intellectually virtuous. It’s something that’s called for by good intellectual character and virtue to the extent that such consideration may prove epistemically fruitful, right?

You don’t listen to the person who espouses the redhead thesis, because you think, “That’s a waste of time. “I have abundant evidence thinking that claim is false. “So it would be foolish and unfruitful for me “to be listening to that point of view,” right? ‘Kay, now we’ve just encountered a problem. It’s kind of a practical problem, but it’s a serious problem, which is that a great deal of incivility arises from a sense that consideration of an opposing view would be epistemically fruitless. The people that engage in the type of behavior that was listed earlier with all those bullet points, all right, most of that comes from a place of well, the people I’m behaving this way toward, they don’t even, their views don’t even dignify serious consideration, all right?

Talking to the other people, those people, in an open minded way would not be epistemically fruitful. First thing I wanna say in response to this problem is there’s plenty of psychological research that would back this up, is that we’re probably not very good at, as human beings, at drawing the line between cases in which talking to another person might be epistemically fruitful and cases in which talking to another, an opposing, you know, an intellectual opponent would bear no epistemic fruit at all.

I think we can’t really be trusted at determining when open mindedness would be a dead end, and when it might prove fruitful, okay. And if that’s right, sorry, if that’s right, that gives rise to the question, well, what do we do, right? Practically speaking, if you agree with this idea that yes, we should show, and all people should show a little more intellectual virtue in the context of public discourse, but they don’t have to show it when doing so would epistemically pointless, how do we go about drawing a line between cases where it would be pointless and cases where it might prove beneficial?

And I have a couple quick suggestions about that, but I wanna set them up with a nice quotation from a recent article from the Bloomberg View by a professor named Noah Smith called Don’t Be Rude, You Loser. [audience laughing] And here’s what he says. He’s responding to a kind of thesis that says, oh, you know, well, so should we be open minded to people who hold this view?

He says, “Putting red haired people in concentration camps “is obviously horrible, but most of our arguments “are over things like Obamacare or anti-poverty programs, “or financial regulation, issues on which “reasonable people can and do disagree. “If you’re uncivil in this sort of situation, “if you call your opponent an idiot “or a liar or a nastier name simply because “you think his or her argument is bad, “you’re basically being overconfident. “You’re assuming that there is “essentially no chance that you’re in the wrong. “So it’s in the public interest for you to rail against “your opponent and score points with the crowd. “If you do this, there is no chance that you yourself “will learn anything from the encounter. “People usually argue to win, but many times “it’s possible to argue to learn.”

And he also says, “It’s a tough call “to decide whether or not it is so awful, “that the only proper response is to denounce it “and its proponents with full vitriol. “In general, these cases are a lot rarer than we think. “People rarely lie, and all but the worst arguments “contain some grain of valuable truth. “If you can’t understand how your opponent “could possibly believe what they believe, “odds are that you could benefit from trying harder “to understand, not always, but usually.” So I’ll close with just a few thoughts about how we might go about trying to draw that line between fruitful exchanges and ones that aren’t.

And the first thing that I think would be useful here is to invoke something like a reasonable disagreement principle. And I’m not thinking about reasonable disagreement in the strict philosophical sense that some of you may be thinking about more generally. To the extent that reasonable disagreement on a given topic or issue is possible, then intellectually virtuous engagement on this topic or issue is advisable.

That basic principle helps sort of draw a distinction between the redhead case, right, where it seems pretty clear that there’s not reasonable disagreement to be had about whether we should round up redheads and put ’em in a concentration camp, on the one hand, and other, more complex issues, say in politics or morality or religion where, you know, reasonable disagreement can be had. So we might say to ourselves, look, if there are reasonable minds who disagree on this topic, then I should probably, if I have the time and other things being equal, and so forth, give it honest consideration to this opposing viewpoint.

Secondly, some of the dynamics that we’ve just drawn attention to underscore the supreme importance of intellectual humility. When you look at a lot of the activity that I described initially, and when you look at if you buy into sort of the comment that I just shared from Noah Smith, what you’ll see is that a lot of incivility emerges from being sort of unaware of or failing to own the limitations of our own evidence or our own views. Intellectual humility is a virtue that helps with that. It helps us be aware of and more honest about our intellectual limitations and mistakes, gaps in evidence, and so forth.

So it seems like one virtue that needs special emphasis in the context of civil discourse, civic discourse, is intellectual humility. Finally, I like this idea of arguing to learn, right? Typically in public discourse, the posture is to either win or to make sure that I can get my reasons and my view out there in the open. And certainly that latter motivation is a good one. We ought to defend what we believe, but we also ought to argue or debate to listen, okay? Arguing in a way that involves thinking I might have something to learn. Even though I disagree with this person, I might have something to learn from him or from her. That’s it, thanks. [applause] [whirring]