Virtue: It's practical rationality all the way down, whether moral or epistemic
Excerpt from a recent email:
It all sounds right to me. All I have to say in reply is that "moral" seems to be defined not conceptually but--as, in my view, almost all other terms--by ostention to paradigm examples. The first appellation (using it as a verb, sorry) is lost to history, but it's been used to name certain things and there we are. Sometimes it's best to keep that, sometimes not, hard to say.
Perhaps the best thing to do is to follow Bob Roberts and just talk about "the virtues" and call them "intellectual virtues" when we are thinking about their promotion of the limited goal of obtaining true beliefs.
As I now see it, then, one of my main taxonomic goals is to make clear the distinction between the proper functional/externalist sense of virtue where it is success in achieving the teloi of human nature, and the internalist sense which is aimed at conscious choice. I cannot but see the latter as the more pressing issue. The target seems to have been described pretty well, what I want to know is how to meet it. This leads back to where I'm more comfortable: practical rationality.
One follow-up: If what you say is right, then what's the most general notion of a reason? It seems to me to be one of practical rationality. Then epistemic reasons are reasons w.r.t. the narrow goal of now having true beliefs for all we consider. I still can't make out a moral reason though. It will still be a species of practical reason, but what's the unity in the goals. We know what the epistemic goods are relatively well. But what are the moral goods. What could it be but maximizing happiness (over all sentient beings). [Yes I'm a consequentialist.]
But then we seem to have a basis for delineating the moral virtues. They are dispositions to promote happiness. Now this raises issues about whether and when truth promotes happiness. Obviously sometimes we are more sad when we know a truth. However, I believe that in the long run we are happier the more truth we know. The odd thing here is that it seems that then sometimes a virtue is both moral and intellectual and sometimes not.
Some virtues tend to promote getting truths and happiness in some people yet not so in others, truth but not happiness or happiness but not truth. Since, as we have noted, the success component is both contingent and largely out of our control, it seems the atomic acts are the proper locus of evaluation and the method of evaluation most appropriate seems to be practical rationality (other than the rather useless--even if true--judgment that so-and-so is just broken because they don't love truth or other people enough or just *can't* see how to pursue it). But Aristotle said not to study the broken specimens. Assuming someone has proper lover for truth and people, what more can we judge than whether they pursue means of getting truth and promoting happiness which, by their lights, have the greatest chance of success?
