Intellectual Virtues

As an educational approach, the character education movement focuses largely on promoting moral virtues, that is, on developing character virtues that promote individual and social flourishing among young people. There is a different but equally important way to conceive of character development and that is to see character development as the development of a person's thinking or their intellectual character. Whereas advocates of moral character development draw their inspiration from the field of ethics and stress the importance of prosocial virtues such as empathy, patience, and temperance, advocates of intellectual character development draw their inspiration from the field of epistemology and stress the importance of the development of virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, accuracy, and meticulousness in thinking. We introduce the field of intellectual character and intellectual character development. We review the main theories and debates about the nature of intellectual virtue and discuss similarities and differences between intellectual and moral virtues. We ask how the intellectual virtues can be developed and what the commonalities and differences are between the development of moral and intellectual virtues. Last, we ask how educators should think about which sets of virtues (intellectual or moral) they foreground in their practice.