Competent Believers. Towards a New Virtue Epistemology

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What is it to be a rational believer? On a widely held view, a rational believer is someone who forms their beliefs by correctly responding to their epistemic reasons, such as their evidence for or against some proposition. But what is to correctly respond to one’s epistemic reasons? The overarching aim of my project is to develop and defend a novel answer to this question: correctly responding to one’s epistemic reasons is a matter of exercising one’s epistemic virtue. A rational believer is thus an epistemically virtuous believer. The answer is novel because it’s based on a novel account of epistemic virtue. The currently dominant forms of virtue epistemology conceive of epistemic virtue either as a kind of skill (athletic skills being the favorite model) or as a species of moral virtue. But neither conception of epistemic virtue delivers a satisfactory account of correctly responding to one’s epistemic reasons. By contrast, on the account I aim to develop, epistemic virtue is indeed a distinctive kind of human excellence: it’s a virtue—not a skill—and it’s distinctively epistemic—not simply a species of moral virtue. My hope is that developing this alternative form of virtue epistemology will offer, not just an adequate account of epistemic reasons-responsiveness, but also a fresh perspective on a number of important issues at the intersection of epistemology and ethics (such as epistemic injustice or the relation between epistemic and moral virtuousness).