I recently ran across the concept of "epistemic vice." In the first instant, I found the approach appealing, but it quickly lost its luster as I examined it more critically.
Like other "virtue/vice" systems, it has a weakness, which is that it sets up a moral judgment on something that should be approached objectively, at least in accordance with my own ethical intuitions. In fact, there's a particular problem with the concepts of epistemic virtue and epistemic vice, which is that, if you look at things at a more "meta" level, the paired concepts themselves ought to be condemned as instances of epistemic vice, under the latter's definition: it is an act of leaping to a judgment of a person's behavior (specifically, the holding of epistemic beliefs, which is a sort of behavior) without considering alternatives. To say "close-mindedness is a vice and not a virtue" is itself a kind of dogmatism, and the act of a closed mind. The whole thing swallows its own tail, ouroboros style, and thus fails.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
