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The Virtues of Ignorance

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Abstract

It is commonly claimed that fully virtuous individuals cannot be ignorant and that everyday intuitions support this fact. Others maintain that there are virtues of ignorance and most people recognize them. Both views cannot be correct. We report evidence from three experiments suggesting that ignorance does not rule out folk attributions of virtue. Additionally, results show that many of these judgments can be predicted by one’s emotional stability—a heritable personality trait. We argue that these results are philosophically important for the study of virtue and we discuss some of the ways individual differences may inform and facilitate current debates in ethics. We close with a cautionary argument detailing the risks of discounting some intuitions simply because they are associated with seemingly less desirable personality traits.

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Notes

  1. There might be a distinction between moral virtues (e.g., courage, modesty, charity) and rational virtues (e.g.,. intelligence, knowledge) (see Driver 2003). We’ll respect this distinction, and we use virtue to refer to moral virtue except where rational virtue is clearly indicated.

  2. Access consciousness is often contrasted with phenomenal consciousness—states that have a qualitative “feel.”

  3. Intellectualism and anti-intellectualism have been used for a variety of positions, perhaps most notably in epistemology. For example, Jason Stanley (2005) argues for anti-intellectualism in epistemology that sometimes non-truth tracking features can play a role in knowledge attribution (e.g., whether the stakes of having a false belief are high or low). Likewise, anti-intellectualism about virtue claims that sometimes an epistemic vice (e.g., ignorance) can be part of virtue attribution.

  4. There are those who agree with Driver that there are virtues of ignorance (e.g., Slote 2004), but they are in the minority.

  5. Driver (2003) does think that rational virtues (as opposed to moral virtues) do require true belief, however.

  6. Those who use empirical methods of the behavioral sciences to help answer philosophically relevant questions have been called Experimental Philosophers. See Feltz 2009; Nadelhoffer and Nahmias 2007; Knobe and Nichols 2008 for reviews.

  7. The large number of comprehension failures was somewhat expected. There were no reliable differences with respect to the number of comprehension failures between Ignorant Modesty (N = 33, 42 %) and False Modesty (N = 24, 32 %) c2 = 1.9, p = .17. However, there were significantly fewer comprehension failures for Accurate modesty (18, 22 %) compared to Ignorant Modesty (c2 = 7.36, p = .007) but not for False Modesty ( c2 = 1.75, p = .19).

  8. All participants were recruited online from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. For these types of surveys, evidence suggests that using samples recruited from this service are at least as good, if not better, than recruiting from alternative, traditional convenience samples (e.g., college undergraduates) (Buhrmester et al. 2011; see also Cokely and Feltz in press; Cokely et al. 2012). Subsequent experiments used this same method.

  9. Two factors varied between Ignorant Modesty and False Modesty. Namely, the sincerity of the utterance and whether the agent had a false belief. To control for this, we tested a separate scenario (N = 56) that was identical to False Modesty except that “insincerely” was replaced with “sincerely” in the first sentence. Results were largely the same between this modified scenario and Ignorant Modesty. Overall, a MANOVA revealed an overall difference in condition F (3, 99) = .02, η 2p  = .1. ANOVAs found similar differences with each of the dependent variables between Ignorant modesty and this revised case: Virtue (M = 4.32, SD = 1.07) F (1, 102) = 5.54, p = .03, η 2p  = .05, Modesty (M = 4.62, SD = 1.13) F (1, 102) = 6.67, p = .01, η 2p  = .06, and Good Person (M = 4.5, SD = 1.01), F < 1.

  10. ANOVAs following significant MANOVAs is a tested practice. See Hummel and Sligo (1971) and Rencher and Scott (1990).

  11. One might worry that Ignorant modesty did not involve ignorance at all and as such may not involve any false beliefs. Our control question was largely intended to ensure that participants thought that the Einstein had a false belief. But apart from that, we tested a new scenario that was identical to Ignorant Modesty except that the last sentence was replaced with the following sentence “Einstein really believed that he was just a good physicist and did not believe that he was one of the best physicists ever.” A MANOVA revealed a similar pattern of responses in this revised scenario (N = 68) and False Modesty F (3, 120) = 3.73, p = .01, η 2p  = .09. ANOVAs further revealed similar patterns of differences with each of the dependent variables comparing False modesty and this revised case: Virtue (M = 4.59, SD = 1.12) F (1, 123) = 4.29, p = .04, η 2p  = .03, Modesty (M = 4.79, SD = 1.17) F (1, 123) = 8.4, p = .004, η 2p  = .06, and Good Person (M = 4.57, SD = 1.07), F (1, 123) = 5.21, p = .03, η 2p  = .04.

  12. There were no reliable differences with respect to comprehension failures between Ignorant Modesty (52 %), False Modesty (40 %), and Accurate Modesty (27 %) (p’s > .1). However, there were significant differences in comprehension failures between Unaware Modesty (9 %) and the other three conditions (ps < .02).

  13. Largely replicating the results of Experiment 1, emotional stability predicted overall judgments of Virtue (r (164) = .21, p = .008) and Good Person (r (164) = .16, p = .04) and trended toward significance for modesty (r (164) = .14, p = .075).

  14. In pilot studies using a between subjects design (N = 94), no statistically significant difference was observed in scenarios similar to accurate and inaccurate inference (F’s < 1).

  15. There were marginally-statistically significant trends indicating emotional stability was related to judgments in Accurate Reasoning: Virtue r (94) = .13, p = .23, Courage r (94) = .19, p = .07, Good Person r (94) = .19, p = .06. This result is consistent with results from the pilot between subjects study, Virtue: r (31) = .29, p = .11, Courage r (31) = .33, p = .07, and Good Person r (31) = .39, p = .03.

  16. Stich (2010) identifies at least three ways that intuitions could play a role in philosophy: (1) conceptual analysis, (2) neo-Platonic projects, or (3) normative projects. He argues convincingly that empirical evidence can have drastically different roles to play in these three different projects.

  17. It is not uncontroversial that intuitions reflect concepts (Machery 2009). If one finds these worries convincing, then we are happy to deal with folk conceptions—a term that is less philosophically charged (Cushman and Mele 2008)

  18. One could always make the occasional mistake when applying one’s concept. But an occasional mistake does not seem to be able to explain the systematic association of intuitions with stable personality traits.

  19. There also are methodological worries that should be avoided or addressed associated with exploratory correlations studies involving individual differences. See Feltz and Cokely 2011.

  20. Indeed, it seems naïve to think that personality could impugn intuitions because they seem bad. While many would only want to call into question moral intuitions, it seems unclear why this general strategy would not generalize to all intuitions associated with seemingly suspect personality traits. And that simply proves too much.

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Acknowledgment

Funding for this project came from the A New Science of Virtues grant from the Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago. We would like to thank Mark Phelan and two anonymous referees from the Review of Philosophy and Psychology for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies, Schreiner University, CMB 6208, 2100 Memorial Boulevard, Kerrville, TX, 78028-5697, USA

    Adam Feltz

  2. Department of Psychology, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA

    Edward T. Cokely

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  1. Adam Feltz
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Correspondence to Adam Feltz.

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Feltz, A., Cokely, E.T. The Virtues of Ignorance. Rev.Phil.Psych. 3, 335–350 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0107-2

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