Responsibilism: A Proposed Shared Research Program

Originally titled “Institutional, Group, and Individual Virtue,” this short draft draws from my talk in an Invited Symposium on "Intersections between Social, Feminist, and Virtue Epistemologies," APA Pacific Division Meeting, April 2011, San Diego. Abstract: This paper examines recent research on individual, social, and institutional virtues and vices; the aim is to explore and make proposals concerning their inter-relationships, as well as to highlight central questions for future research with the study of each. More specifically, the paper will focus on how these studies can be approached in a systematic way such that it contributes to greater convergence between virtue theory, feminist epistemology, and social epistemology. To this end, the paper develops a model of responsibility qua diachronic (longitudinal) assessment of the inquiry-directed agential habits (motivations, activities, and strategies), while explaining the place of this model within a broader, 15-point proposed “Responsibilist” research program." While unpublished, much of this "shared responsibilist research program" is developed in my later papers, including especially (2021 -linked below) "Cultivating Doxastic Responsibility: Ameliorative Epistemological Projects and the Ethics of Knowledge."