Generous Virtues: Rethinking the Value of Intellectual Virtues in Social Terms

The classical Virtue Epistemology, one of the most interesting contributions of late 20th century American philosophy, proposed to analyze knowledge and epistemic evaluation in general in terms of intellectual virtues. In this approach, these virtues were understood as faculties or personal traits that contribute to the production of knowledge and other epistemic goods. However, the value of some plausible candidates for intellectual virtues, which can be called “generous virtues,” cannot be explained in those terms. This paper proposes a novel account of the general value of intellectual virtues that includes other‑regarding ones. To that end, it considers three strategies of socialization of Virtue Epistemology, and proposes original solution: Epistemic Social Environmentalism.