The Different Types of Virtues and Vices

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Vices are personal characteristics that you know one person may have and another person may not. Some vices I want to say take the form of character traits like close-mindedness You might think of as a character trade or the devices that take the forms of ways of thinking like wishful thinking. And then there are vices thatTake the form of attitudes So for example, you might think of prejudice as an attitude and as an intellectual vice. But the really big point is this so a vice Italy is thing that's kind of bad. That's the basic notion of a vice. It's in the same neighborhood but a vice seems more normative right much more judgmental.

All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have been correct. Properties that systematically prevent us from being correct, and for which we can legitimately be blamed, are “intellectual vices.” Examples might include closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, overconfidence, selective attention, and so on. Quassim Cassam is a philosopher who studies knowledge in various forms, and who has recently written a book Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. We talk about the nature of intellectual vices, how they manifest in people and in organizations, and what we can possibly do to correct them in ourselves.

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Quassim Cassam received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He previously held faculty positions at Cambridge University and University College London. He has served as the president of the Aristotelian Society, and was awarded a Leadership Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.

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