Before reading Vices of the Mind by Quassim Cassam I had never given vices much thought. I had not considered what made a vice a vice, why vices are so bad, and I certainly had not thought about differences between different kinds of vices. Cassam specifically looks at epistemic vices, which are vices that obstruct knowledge. He spends a lot of time at the outset of his book diving deep into all the questions about vices that I had never considered, and for the purposes of his book he differentiates moral vices versus epistemic vices.
Cassam writes, “some epistemic vices might be moral as well as epistemic failings, and be morally as well as epistemically blameworthy, but being morally blameworthy isn’t what makes them epistemic vices.”
Vices, Cassam explains, systematically lead to bad outcomes. Epistemic vices can be understood as systematically obstructing knowledge in one way or another. Moral vices, on the other hand, systematically lead to negative outcomes for an individual or society. The examples that Cassam uses to differentiate between moral vices versus epistemic vices are moral vices like cruelty and mundane epistemic vices like gullibility.
Being cruel is a moral vice. It doesn’t necessarily obstruct knowledge, but being cruel will systematically harm other people, damage relationships, and hinder human progress. Being gullible will systematically prevent someone from accurately understanding the world, but it won’t systematically harm anyone. A cruel person is likely to hurt others either physically or emotionally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t be able to obtain knowledge and information to accurately understand the world. A gullible person may not hurt anyone, but is likely to misunderstand the world and make poor decisions based on inaccurate understandings.
Diving into the intricacies of vices and distinguishing between moral vices versus epistemic vices may feel like a tedious and unnecessary endeavor, but I think that diving into these differences is important and helpful for us. It helps us better understand how our behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits may contribute to negative outcomes in the world. Taking such a careful look at vices helps us get better at thinking about what we like and dislike in the world, and helps us better disentangle what is good, what is bad, and how we understand what leads to the positive things we like and what contributes to the negativities we wish to avoid. It is helpful to pull things apart, to study their component parts, and to see how they come back together to form a whole so that we can better understand ourselves and the contexts of the lives that we find ourselves within.
Novel Learning 