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Journal of Business Ethics

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01-04-2013

Epistemic Virtues in Business

Author: Boudewijn de Bruin

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 4/2013

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Abstract

This paper applies emerging research on epistemic virtues to business ethics. Inspired by recent work on epistemic virtues in philosophy, I develop a view in which epistemic virtues contribute to the acquisition of knowledge that is instrumentally valuable in the realisation of particular ends, business ends in particular. I propose a conception of inquiry according to which epistemic actions involve investigation, belief adoption and justification, and relate this to the traditional ‘justified true belief’ analysis of knowledge. I defend the view that epistemic virtues enable and/or motivate people to perform epistemic actions. An examination of the key epistemic virtues of love of knowledge, epistemic courage, temperance, justice, generosity and humility provides some initial evidence suggesting that the way epistemic virtues enable or motivate is by countering a number of biases that have been uncovered by behavioural economics, and also indicates ways in which the instrumental epistemic value view is superior to other approaches to epistemic virtue offered in the literature.

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Pritchard (2005) mentions medical ethics. Marcum (2009) is an empirical rather than a normative piece on epistemic virtues in medical decision-making. Without using the term epistemic virtue, similar research exists in accounting (Charron and Lowe 2008). De Bruin (2014) is the first monograph on epistemic virtues in business ethics, under contract to Cambridge University Press.

Baehr uses the term intellectual virtue, but such terminology has unpleasant intellectualist connotations, suggesting, for instance, that these virtues are especially important to rather high-end sorts of belief formation. Hence I use epistemic virtues.

Most virtue epistemologists use terms such as open-mindedness, fairness or impartiality to describe the virtue. Nothing, I believe, would prohibit us from staying closer to Aristotle’s terminology, so I use the term justice here.

If humility is used as a translation of mikropsuchia, humility would be the other extreme of megalopsuchia. Much can be said in favour of translating mikropsuchia as false humility, though, and recalling that humility derives from humus (earth), humility (possibly prefixed by appropriate) or down-to-earthness could be used as a translation of the virtue of megalopsuchia. That, at least, is how humility is understood here.

More precisely, the insight of Black, Scholes and Merton was that to find the price of an option one need not calculate the risk premium, because the risk premium is already contained in the asset’s price; to calculate the price of the option, the only significant variable to be plugged in is the asset’s volatility. The theory does not say anything—and cannot say anything—about the right way to estimate volatility. A history of only 5 years turned out to be too meager.

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Title: Epistemic Virtues in Business
Author: Boudewijn de Bruin
Publication date: 01-04-2013
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 4/2013
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1677-3

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