The Decline of Virtue Ethics and the Rise of Ideology
Can "Virtue Epistemology" Help Subdue Zealotry?
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
Article Seven, Hamas Charter1
“With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world…They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution…They were behind World War I… They were behind World War II, There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”
Article Twenty-Two, Hamas Charter
“Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion.””
Article Thirty-Two, Hamas Charter
The words above, from the Hamas Charter, are frightening. But more frightening is how so many people who claim to be on the political left and who have strong opinions about Israel and Palestine have either never read this charter, have chosen to minimize this charter, or have even empathized with this charter. Worse, many have repeated the ideas and language from this charter in their everyday lives. This charter, one that explicitly rejects peace and states, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time,”2 is but one document available from a mass of information and resources that helps to complicate the growingly standard leftwing narrative that “Israel is largely responsible for this crisis.”
In the days following October 7th and up until today, we have seen people openly celebrating Hamas. People have been justifying, denying, or minimizing the mass torture, rape, infanticide, kidnappings, and general massacres that Hamas inflicted upon Israelis and anyone who happened to be in Israel at the time. A professor at Cornell University called the October 7th massacre “exhilerating” and “energizing,” to the cheers of a crowd. A concerningly large number of student organizations at Harvard issued a statement saying, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” On October 8th, as the world was starting to see the videos of sadism that Hamas members themselves gleefully uploaded to social media, University of California, Santa Barbara Sociology Professor and Department Chair Lisa Hajjar tweeted an image of a bulldozer with a Palestinian flag breaking victoriously through a barricade. Protests across the globe for the welfare of Gazans exclusively lay blame on Israel, ignoring the realities of Hamas, Iran, Egypt and Qatar, and other significant factions. Nobody at these protests are calling for Hamas to surrender, to release hostages, to be tried for war crimes. Nobody is saying Hamas has the ability to end this war. Hamas openly and proudly pledges to reject peace and to prolong conflict as long as possible, so long as that means being able to kill all Jews and destroy the state of Israel. They make this goal loud and clear. But instead, we see American politicans like Rshaida Tlaib trying to justify the use of the genocidal slogan, “from the River to the Sea,” denying what is right in front of them: it is not a slogan for freedom, it is a slogan for destruction.
In looking at the havoc wreaked by the infectious spread of unfounded self-righteousness, it is clear to me that one cannot be ethical without being attentive to how one pursues and processes information. Likewise, one cannot be ethical if one chooses to minimize or outright ignore information, information such as the Hamas Charter. An example of the way that poor methods of interacting with information affects ethics can be found in the way in which we make medical decisions. For example, if you pursue medical knowledge exclusively via Facebook groups, you are more likely to make medical decisions for yourself or your relatives that can cause harm. Both ignoring the Hamas Charter, or exclusively perusing Facebook groups for medical advice, are examples of how the tools one uses in the pursuit or diregard of knowledge has a real-life ethical impact.
I provided quotes from the Hamas Charter since it is just one small example of something within easy grasp that few have bothered to reach. I would bet that the stronger a person’s opinions, the less a person has read, with an open-mind, anything that challenges said opinions, despite plenty of available resources. Part of the reason someone may have not read those resources is because they are generally not amplified. To use Marxian language, they are not amplified in part because those who own the means of ideological reproduction - universities, media, or social media algorithms - are not reproducing them. But, to poke another hole in the shade of ideological blinders, not only is this information not amplified, many individuals with the strongest opinions choose not to seek it out, not to consider that it might exist.
So, why are people choosing not to seek out this information? I am sure there are many overlapping reasons. But one idea that has been appealing to me since I first came across it several years ago is the idea of “Virtues of the Mind.”
“Virtues of the Mind:” A Blueprint for Ethical Thought
Linda Zagzebski is an American philosopher who is noted for suggesting that virtue ethics is a foundational component of epistemology. What does that mean? Virtue ethics is a branch of the philosophy of ethics - a branch often associated with Aristotle - of what character traits a person should develop to best live a “good life” and behave ethically. Epistemolgy is the philosophy of knowledge, concerning questions such as: what are the best methods for deriving knowledge, what are the limitations to our ability to obtain knowledge, and so forth. Zagzebski, then, says that one cannot come to accurate information without cultivating intellectual virtues, that it is ethical to work on the mind in a particular way so as to yield more accurate information, and the less ethically you are cultivating your mind, the less accurate your knowledge will be.
Zagzekbski’s book, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, posits something both complicated and simple: the way that we think is also a site of virtues and vices. By identifying the range of intellectual virtues and vices a person might have, we can work on them, or at least recognize them as they arise in ourselves or others. Working on our intellectual virtues will aid in best arriving at knowledge, and the more accurate our knowledge, the more ethical are the speech and actions that we might understake as a result. Zagzekbsi identifies intellectual vices as including, but not limited to:
gullibility, carelessness, close-mindedness, negligence, idleness, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail.
“Intellectual virtues,” by contrast, are virtues she sees as aiding in the correct pursuit of knowledge. These include:
humility, caution, virtuous motives, intellectual courage, open-mindedness, and carefulness.
Zagzebski’s “vices of the mind” are an epidemic in a world overtaken by ideological zealotry. The vices of the mind seem especially apparent when one tries to remove themselves from the adrenaline rush of righteousness, and instead look at how many who claim to care about an issue, such as Israel and Palestine, choose seek and process their information. In University of Warwick’s philosophy professor Quassim Cassam’s article for Aeon about virtue epistemology, he warns that those who are unwilling to check themselves for such intellectual virtues or vices are the first to try to turn the table - that is, to accuse others of the very vice that they themselves are indulging. For example, a conspiracy theorist might claim: it is not they who are gullible for believing Infowars, it is you who is gullible for believing the government!
Many such instances of intellectual vices, and turning the tables, arise in conversations with those on the far-left about Israel. The random person on the internet with an algorithmically-heightened emotion and an algorithmically-induced need to state an opinion often gets their information from a broken telephone game that all originated with the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry or other institutions known to be staffed by antisemites. Additionally, journalists - those supposedly responsible for exercising intellectual virtues such as caution and precision - continue to uncritically publish claims of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry without providing qualifications or complications, and some even refuse to walk back the information when those claims have been debunked. Regardless of if newspapers retract information that has been widely publicized as false, the fact that those papers neglected their duty of intellectual virtue means that the false information is still real on social media, still real in peoples’ hearts and minds. And true to Cassam’s claims about “turning the tables,” we see that many of those online or on the streets who take information from institutions known to be violently prejudiced against both Jews and Israel are the first to claim that others are gullible for believing information from the IDF that has been corroborated by the US government.
The above is just one example of an intellectual vice regarding Israel and Palestine, a vice of gullibility and carelesness, but others abound. There is far more information than most people could reasonably be expected to curate for themselves on the history and reality of the conflict. But many people choose to have a strong opinion, to join in a mob frenzy, while their speech and actions belie a plethora of intellectual vices. I myself do not claim to be absent of these vices or an exemplar of intellectual virtue. Far from it, I have long hesitated in writing on these topics specifically because I am aware of the limitations of my knowledge. But it is impossible to have knowledge without limitations. Instead, I have resigned myself to writing imperfectly while aspiring to the intellectual virtue of open-mindedness, hoping to broaden my knowledge, not to truncate it. Perhaps, in keeping in mind the concept of intellectual virtue ethics, we might help break another chain in the stronghold of ideology.
Officially titled “Hamas Covenant: the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”
Article Thirteen, Hamas Chater