American Philosophical Quarterly
Volume 48, Number 1, January 2011
OPEN-MINdEdNESS
AS A MOrAl VIrTUE
Nomy Arpaly
O pen-mindedness appears to be a cogni-
tive disposition: an open-minded person is
disposed to gain, lose, and revise beliefs in a
particular, reasonable way.1 It is also a moral
virtue, for we blame, for example, the man
who quickly comes to think a new neighbor
untrustworthy because he drives the wrong
car or wears the wrong clothes—for his
closed-mindedness. How open-mindedness
could be a moral virtue is a puzzle, though,
because exercises of moral virtues are expres-
sions of moral concern, whereas gaining,
losing, and revising beliefs are not actions
and so cannot be actions taken out of moral
concern. Solving this puzzle is the purpose
of this essay.
Of course, whether belief-formation, -loss,
or -revision is ever an action is disputed.
The author has argued elsewhere that they
are not, for it seems that, while it is possible
to some degree to do voluntarily do things
to manipulate one’s beliefs, and so to make
oneself more likely to have or lack certain
beliefs, change in belief per se is nonvolun-
tary.2 Thus, if open-mindedness is a pattern
of belief change, it is not a state brought to
existence by intention. you can, of course,
intend to try to keep an open mind, but the
topic of discussion here is not the (surely vir-
tuous) intentional action of trying to keep an
open mind but the state of open-mindedness
itself—the one that you can try to reach and
©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
sometimes fail. This will serve as an assump-
tion for the present work; for those who hold
that change in belief is a voluntary action,
the present work can be seen as an exercise
in determining whether or not one can live
without the thesis when thinking about open-
mindedness.
A few words are also in order about the
claim that the exercise of a moral virtue is an
expression of moral concern. This, too, is an
assumption of the present work. Some think
any disposition that makes us more likely
to do the right thing is a virtue, but when
used here “moral virtue” means something
stronger, namely, something that expresses
moral concern (or, if you wish, something
that expresses good will).3 In that way, this
view is different from consequentialist views
of virtue4 and resembles that of Aristotle. For
Aristotle,5 the issue was concern for what is
fine; for us modern day ethicists it is concern
for what is right or good.6 Aristotle points out
that many people are disposed to defend cities
in battle: there are those who are strangely
fearless, those who are very skilled at arms,
and so on. But only the brave person has true
virtue, because only in the case of the brave
person is it true that his disposition to defend
his city is the result of his concern for doing
the fine and avoiding the base. Similarly, there
is nothing morally virtuous in a disposition to
tell the truth if it is the result of autism, even if
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it so happens that telling the truth all the time
is the right thing to do; there is nothing mor-
ally virtuous in a tendency to help people if it
is just the result of wanting to be liked, even
if the intelligent approval seeker does exactly
what the benevolent person would have done;
and so on. Agreeing with Aristotle in this
matter does not, of course, commit one to an
Aristotelian (or Kantian, or Utilitarian for that
matter) view of the good or the right.
Morally virtuous acts express actual con-
cern for what is right or good, and not merely
concern for what happens to coincide with
what is right or good. A trait is a virtue to
the extent that it is an expression of moral
concern, a vice to the extent that it is an
expression of ill will or moral indifference.
For the purpose of this essay, an action ex-
pressing ill will or moral indifference shall
be a blameworthy action, and one performed
out of good will shall be a praiseworthy ac-
tion. Blameworthy and praiseworthy actions
will sometimes be referred to as “virtuous”
and “vicious” respectively, but the terms
“virtuous” and “vicious” are different from
“praiseworthy” and “blameworthy” in one
way: they are applicable in a traditional,
noncontroversial way to things other than
actions—emotions, for example, or traits—
that also express good will, ill will, or moral
indifference. How nonactions can express
such things will be discussed later.
So much for assumptions. The puzzle, then,
is how to understand how open-mindedness
could be anything like a moral virtue within
this framework.
The question of how open-mindedness
could be a virtue is sharpened by the fact that
sometimes having no opinion would appear to
be a sign of vice. In his memoir, Killing Time
(1996) Paul Feyerabend discusses his youth
in Nazi Austria. Everyone around him was
either for or against the Nazis, but as for him,
“during the Nazi period, I paid little attention
to the general talk about Jews, Communism,
the Bolshevik threat: I did not accept it, nor
did I oppose it.”7 Feyerabend explains that he
occasionally stimulated himself intellectually
or provoked others by making either pro-Nazi
or anti-Nazi arguments, depending on whom
there was to provoke. “I was too contrarian to
be loyal to anyone,” he says. Even at the end
of the war, as germany surrendered, he failed
to see why people so one-sidedly took it to be
a good thing. In the case of Feyerabend, not
having an opinion does not seem to be a show
of virtue. In fact, it appears scandalous. The
full extent of Nazi evil might not have been
available to Feyerabend, but it was certainly
the case that he could see enough to make any
decent person furious, and to make any decent
person conclude that the Nazis were a force
for evil. The oppression of Jewish students in
his class, the violence on the streets on such
occasions as Kristallnacht, the content of
Hitler’s war-mongering speeches, and many
other things should have been enough for a
very intelligent young man with any concern
for the fate of humanity to draw strong moral
conclusions. If open-mindedness is a moral
virtue, it is not simply lack of opinion, or
feeling that questions of good and evil are
hard to figure out. What is it, then?
The answer starts from the fact that, even
if beliefs are not held or changed voluntarily,
our concerns—the various things we want—
are often involved in belief formation and
belief-change. There are processes that do
not involve intending to believe but which
are nonetheless processes in which facts
about what we believe (or fail to believe, or
continue to believe, or believe with particular
intensity, etc.) are causally determined by
our wants, processes whereby our beliefs
would have been different if our wants were
different. Our wants or concerns can cause
us to believe, cause us not to believe, or be
responsible for any number of features of
our beliefs as mental states, and can do so
in more ways than can be accounted for in
this essay. We shall, however, look at four
major ways in which the conative has effects
 OPEN-MINdEdNESS AS A MOrAl VIrTUE /
on the cognitive, whether virtue or vice is in
question or not.
First, our concerns influence our emotions,
which in turn have an impact on our beliefs.
A fan of the red Sox, someone who wants
them to win, will have emotions that some-
one who does not particularly want the red
Sox to win will not have. She will be happy
when they win, sad when they lose, and have
mood swings as the team’s fortunes change.
Similarly, new emotions are gained (and
other ones lost) as one develops concern for
a person, a cause, a place, or the like. Emo-
tions, in turn, influence our epistemic appa-
ratus—most famously for the worst, though
in principle emotions can nudge us toward
more reasonable beliefs as well as toward less
reasonable ones. If you are infatuated with
a woman, you might be blind to her faults,
and if you are angry at a man, you might be
blind to his virtues. If you are a middle-class
American woman and you hate yourself,
you are likely to overestimate your weight.
If you are afraid of your teacher, you might
overestimate his height. If you are happy
because of a baseball game, your resulting
good mood can make you overly optimistic
when you later reason about the likely results
of the coming elections. This is what has been
called “belief under the influence,”8 and it is
extremely common.
Second, our concerns influence our atten-
tion, which in turn affects belief formation. A
person who, like me, has a passion for owls
will be more likely than other people (all else
being equal) to notice an owl’s hoot, or to no-
tice that the word “knowledge” has the word
“owl” in its center. A friend of mine with a
passion for cars effortlessly notices the makes
and models of cars whenever he sees them. In
these cases, attention leads to the formation
of reasonable beliefs that, although available
(in principle) to others in the same physical
circumstances, are nonetheless unlikely to
be formed by others owing to their failure to
attend. Interestingly, under some conditions,
77
what makes a person better at noticing things
can also make her “notice” things that are not
there: the epistemic effects of our concerns
on our attention are not limitlessly positive.
Consider the person who is particularly con-
cerned with sex at some moment: his attention
is likely to be drawn to things in the world that
incline him to believe that he is found more
sexually attractive by others than he in fact is,
and that opportunities for sexual liaisons are
more prevalent than they in fact are. depend-
ing on what we want, just about anything can
dominate our attention, and thereby dominate
our beliefs—in a similar way. It could be
another person: as the pop song says, “Today
I saw somebody/She looks just like you/She
walked like you do/I thought it was you.” Or
perhaps your concern with your subject of
research is such that your attention is drawn
by each passing fact that might bear upon
it, so that every time your eye passes over
the word “human” you suspect that it reads
“Humean.”
Third, what we are concerned with can
also affect our ability to learn: what bears
on that with which we are concerned is also
something about which we retain beliefs more
easily. For most of us it is, all else being equal,
easier to learn about a topic we love than one
we do not, and easier to learn about a topic
of importance for someone or something we
love than to learn about a topic of no such im-
portance. There seem to be at least two expla-
nations for how our concerns affect learning,
and so belief-retention, in this way. For one
thing, we are diligent in doing what it takes
to learn the topic: we do our homework, and
even extra homework. For another, memory
appears to work in our favor when we set
ourselves to learn something that bears on
our concerns. If one is really interested in the
Enron financial scandal but is not interested in
rome, one can do the same homework with
equal diligence for a class about rome and a
class about Enron, yet remember a list of facts
about Enron better than an otherwise similar
78 / AMErICAN PHIlOSOPHICAl QUArTErly
list of facts about rome. The facts about the
famous financial scandal somehow seem to
stick with one much more readily, one finds.
So it goes, when one really wants to know.
Outside of the classroom, similar principles
apply. The person who really wants to know,
who is really concerned with what is going
on, is the person who is more likely to read
the guide, ask questions, and call ahead to see
if the place is open (to actively seek out infor-
mation to learn) and then is also more likely to
remember the phone number, remember the
details of the novel, remember the courses of
the expensive meal (to learn more readily).
Fourth, what we are concerned with seems to
influence our tendency to draw conclusions or
to feel confidence in the conclusions we have
drawn. We are often more cautious in drawing
conclusions when the stakes are high by the
lights of our concerns, and often less confident
in our conclusions once we have drawn them.
Concern for a topic thus seems to induce an
epistemic caution or pickiness that can be
epistemically advantageous. Consider the sort
of situation often discussed in the context of
epistemic contextualism.9 Perhaps, being in the
middle of a real estate transaction, it is very
important to me that the bank is open tomor-
row, and tomorrow is Saturday. If you ask me,
“Is the bank open tomorrow?” I am likely to
respond, “Oh, let me double-check.” After all,
I have read only once, and on the bank’s web-
site, that the bank is open tomorrow; I feel as
though I might have read the wrong line, and
besides, I think to myself, the website could
be out of date. I suspect the answer is that the
bank is open, but I lack confidence: I think I
should call and ask. Whatever the truth or fal-
sity of epistemic contextualism, as far as I am
concerned, I do not know yet whether the bank
is open tomorrow or not; I feel like someone
who does not know. And it is precisely the
importance to me of the facts that strips me of
my confidence. If I have no particular reason
to be at the bank tomorrow, and we are having
an anthropological discussion of an idle nature
about how things in America seem never to
close, as opposed to Europe where they seem
keen to close as often as possible, I will be
likely to say, “My bank is open on Saturdays,”
feeling sure that I know it is so. It would not
occur to me that this belief of mine might be
in need of double-checking, and all because
the truth of my belief is not, in this context, a
matter of great concern to me.10
Notice that it can be misleading to say
that it is the fact that the business hours of
the bank have a practical significance to me
that supports or undermines my confidence
in my conclusions. The truth about the
bank’s closing is relevant to an action that
is “practical” in the colloquial sense (which
connotes selfish motives). you can also say
it is practically significant in another, more
general sense: the agent needs to know it in
order to decide how to act, and that decision
is significant in its effect on the agent’s goals.
(This does not concern more complex senses
of “practical,” like the Kantian sense.11) But
if a potential belief is relevant to something I
care about, the same effect can occur in situ-
ations in which no decision depends on the
potential belief—certainly not a significant
one. Suppose a student of mine is about to
interview for a job. Because finding a job
for my student is a nontrivial goal of mine,
it is not far-fetched to say that when I give
him advice, my actions are of practical sig-
nificance to me. I advise him as follows: “I
know you’re quite witty, but if you talk to a
Kantian ethicist, remember: he or she is less
likely than other philosophers to respond well
to jokes about his or her view.” I am fairly
sure, suppose, that I know what I am talking
about. And now suppose that our conversation
is being overheard by two other philosophers
who are very keen on the importance of sci-
entific evidence when reasoning about human
beings. They do not know my student, and
for them no decision depends on the truth or
falsity of my claim. And yet while they feel
the intuitive pull of my advice (they know the
 OPEN-MINdEdNESS AS A MOrAl VIrTUE /
same Kantians I do), they do not share my
confidence in its truth. “Folk-statistics are so
unreliable,” says one to the other. “She can’t
possibly know that Kantians have different
senses of humor from other philosophers.” In
this vignette, the philosophers who overhear
me talking to my student are concerned with
the truth of my claim even more than I am,
and they are correspondingly less confident
that it is true. They have no great practical
interest in the truth of my claim, but because
of their theoretical interests in folk statistics
and the like, the truth of my claim matters
even more to them than it does to me. Hence
it appears to me that it is most reasonable
to hold that it is concern itself, rather than
degree of practicality per se, that influences
our confidence in such situations.
When what a person is concerned with is
specifically moral,12 all four of these effects
show up to influence her beliefs. Our moral
concerns thus influence our beliefs as a spe-
cific instance of the general principle that our
concerns influence our beliefs.
First, being concerned with morality cre-
ates emotions that one does not have if one
is not concerned with morality. One feels
guilty at the thought of having acted badly,
indignant upon reading about corruption in
the newspaper, contented at the sight of a
good deed being done. And these emotions,
like any emotion, can influence the forma-
tion of belief. Second, the morally concerned
person has her attention shaped in part by
this concern. For example, as in many day-
to-day situations it is morally wrong to give
offense, she thinks twice about whether she
has, perhaps, accidentally given offense to
an innocent colleague. She will check—and
sometimes simply note—whether the clothes
she is thinking of buying might be the prod-
uct of slave labor, and she notices things like
deprivation and paternalism that a morally
unconcerned person might not.13 Third, the
person who cares more about morality also
learns better, other things being equal, the
79
skills often needed for a moral life: she learns
about how to avoid causing accidental of-
fense, how to effectively maximize the effects
of charitable giving, and so on, both by being
more likely to seek out this information and
by being more likely to retain it after receiv-
ing it.14 And fourth, the person who cares
more about morality will, other things being
equal, not leap to an ill-supported conclusion
when there is something morally significant at
stake. While the average person will be slow
to attain certainty when it concerns her own
bank account, the morally concerned person
will also be slow to attain certainty when it
concerns another person’s bank account.
A person who shows a consistent pattern
of coming to hasty conclusions, or overcon-
fident conclusions, when it comes to morally
significant matters is suspected of not being
sufficiently concerned with what is morally
important. For a modest but realistic example,
imagine a group of people from the midwest-
ern United States eating sushi for the first time.
They all regard the unfamiliar food with suspi-
cion, as they fear anything spicier than black
pepper. One of them, Todd, contemplates the
green stuff on his plate, which is in fact wasabi,
and asks, “What’s the green stuff?” Jay shrugs
and says, “Avocado.” Todd goes ahead and eats
a spoonful of wasabi; unsurprisingly, this is
a very painful experience for him. It is only
natural that Todd should feel Jay has shown
himself to be a little less than a good person on
this occasion. The question he is likely to ask
himself is this: Had the wasabi been on Jay’s
plate rather than on Todd’s, would Jay have
leapt to his conclusion that it was avocado so
quickly? Or would he have been less certain?
Unless Jay is equally cavalier with his own
culinary welfare as he was with Todd’s, Todd
is likely to conclude that Jay wants to take
care of himself at the dinner table, but that it
doesn’t much matter to him what happens to
his companions. And such a conclusion would
allow Todd to diagnose Jay as suffering from
less than an ideal level of moral concern for his
80 / AMErICAN PHIlOSOPHICAl QUArTErly
dining companions. Someone who had been
more concerned would have lacked Jay’s blithe
confidence and answered, “I don’t know,”
instead of, “Avocado.” Though we have not
yet arrived at open-mindedness, this sort of
case begins to reveal the ways in which moral
concern might be—not directly expressed, but
revealed in belief.15
How to get from the suggestive story of
Todd and Jay to a precise theory of open-
mindedness is not yet clear, but some help
will come if we follow a useful heuristic put
forward (as something a little more than that)
by Philippa Foot.16 Foot holds that we identify
virtues in cases in which the average person
has a natural tendency to do what is wrong,
the virtuous person being distinguished in
this respect from the average person. People
tend to be selfish, and so there is a virtue of
generosity; people tend to be cowardly, so
there is a virtue of courage; and so on. The
person who displays a particular virtue does
well in the sort of situation in which people
tend to fail. The sort of situation in which
the virtue of open-mindedness becomes
relevant is the situation in which we meet
counter-evidence to our beliefs. People tend
to respond to such situations by not changing
their minds, or not changing them enough,
and to do so in many cases because of what
they care about, directly or indirectly. They
close their minds, as it were, to the evidence.
But only as it were, for talk of “closing one’s
mind” to evidence suggests a voluntaristic
theory of belief, whereas the mechanisms
by which our concerns influence our beliefs
might very well be, as has been assumed here,
mechanisms that run from what is wanted to
what is believed only indirectly.
The moral vice of closed-mindedness is
exemplified in cases in which someone’s
mind is closed to the evidence when some-
thing morally meaningful is at stake. The
simplest cases are straightforward: the doting
parent who will not accept that her child is
blameworthy for deeds done at school; the
bad driver who ignores evidence to the effect
that he is a menace to others; the therapist
who ignores empirical debunkings of his
methods. More complex cases can go beyond
rejecting a “painful” truth to cases in which
the truth that is rejected is perhaps innocent
in itself, but fraught with more substantive
implications. For just a taste of such a case,
consider Molly, who decides to get a divorce
because her life with her husband has been
utterly miserable for her and probably, she
suspects, for him as well. luckily, they do
not have children. To her great alarm, Molly’s
parents, who have usually been supportive of
her decisions, are incensed at the very idea
of her getting a divorce. They call her “self-
ish,” “shallow,” “capricious.” The parents
themselves have been miserable with each
other, but they have remained married for
thirty years. Presented with the evidence that
Molly should get a divorce, they cannot come
to the conclusion—not because they cannot
accept Molly’s divorce itself, but because
there is some connection to their own con-
cerns for their own marriage and their own
decisions. To admit that Molly should get a
divorce, and is not being selfish, shallow, or
capricious, suggests in some way (perhaps
unconsciously) that they, too, should get a
divorce—should have got one long ago—and
this is the conclusion that generates resis-
tance, given their concerns.17
Some cases of concern-based resistance to
evidence against one’s beliefs are not mor-
ally important. It hardly matters, morally
speaking, if a person is under the impression
that he can dance when he cannot, or that his
hair is more plentiful than it is, even if these
sorts of irrationality in belief stem from the
believer’s concerns. But in cases like Molly’s
moral stakes exist: the way Molly’s parents
treat their daughter at this difficult juncture
in her life depends on whether or not they
can accept the wisdom of the divorce. And
while a failure of Molly’s parents to believe
what the evidence requires might suggest a
 OPEN-MINdEdNESS AS A MOrAl VIrTUE /
rather mundane moral failing, some cases
of resistance to new evidence appear to be
morally reprehensible.
Consider the case of Ignaz Semmelweis. As
a young assistant doctor in charge of a ma-
ternity clinic at the Vienna general Hospital
in the nineteenth century, Ignaz Semmelweis
ordered his underlings to wash their hands
between performing autopsies and handling
patients. As a result, the incidence of fatal
puerperal (“childbed”) fever dropped dra-
matically. Semmelweis’s hypothesis, that the
absence of hand washing was the only cause
of the ubiquity of the disease, was mostly
ignored and ridiculed. He was dismissed
from the hospital and disgraced by the medi-
cal community. He spent the rest of his life
trying desperately to convince people of the
criminality of the doctors who kept ignoring
his results.
The most striking feature of the story is the
compelling and simple nature of the evidence
in spite of which Semmelweis’s colleagues
and superiors refused to wash their hands.
Why did they act this way? Why were they
not simply elated at finding a way to reduce
the rate at which patients in their care were
dying? Why not follow the procedure that
reduced the death rates first and worry about
the theory later? It would appear that, if they
were to admit that Semmelweis was right and
that there is a causal relationship between
failing to wash one’s hand and the death of
one’s patients, they would have to admit that
they were, in fact, killers, even if by acci-
dent. Threatened by this realization, perhaps,
their minds rejected the ideas of the young
assistant—effectively killing many people as
a result.
Such cases are sometimes known as cases
of “cognitive dissonance”: the bald man who
will not see that he is bald, Molly’s parents
who will not see that their daughter should
get a divorce, and Semmelweis’s colleagues
not seeing that it is worth trying his hand-
washing techniques are all examples of the
81
sort of person said to suffer from cognitive
dissonance. This terminology is not used in
this essay; it is best to think of the cases here
brought up simply as cases in which belief
revision in some way threatens something
with which a believer is deeply concerned,
and so as cases in which evidence is not as
efficacious as it would otherwise be in bring-
ing about revised beliefs. The very concept
of cognitive dissonance as it has sometimes
been theorized in the psychological literature
is not clearly helpful for my purposes. In a
standard formulation, cognitive dissonance is
a tendency to eliminate the unpleasantness of
noted inconsistency in belief by eliminating
the inconsistency.18 This theory is somewhat
suspect in that it implies that any resolution
of the inconsistency would serve equally well,
whereas it seems not to be a coincidence that
the dancer who gets evidence presented to
him of his incompetence resolves the tension
between the evidence and his belief in his own
natural talent in favor of the latter belief. The
pain from which the people in my cases recoil
is not simply the pain of being inconsistent,
but the pain of admitting that one is bald or
that one was wrong to stay married or that
one’s way of treating patients has been deadly
to many of them.19
We have a tendency to resist evidence
that conflicts with cherished beliefs in a
closed-minded way, and Semmelweis’s col-
leagues can serve as our epitomes of closed-
mindedness. Who, then, is the person who is
morally praiseworthy for open-mindedness?
She is the person whose moral concern insu-
lates her from the pull of other concerns that
would otherwise render her unresponsive to
evidence, in contexts in which something
morally significant might be at stake. Imagine
an older colleague of Semmelweis’s who is
faced with Semmelweis’s evidence for the
significance of hand washing, with its grim
implication that his own actions have caused
many needless deaths. It is natural for this
colleague to be upset, but if he were more
82 / AMErICAN PHIlOSOPHICAl QUArTErly
concerned for morality he would not have
rejected the evidence but rather listened, out
of fear of causing more deaths and hope of
saving more lives. Perhaps he would have
been in tears, as Semmelweis himself is said
to have been upon his discovery. When lis-
tening to the evidence, the need to save lives
would be at the forefront of his attention,
rather than his own self-esteem or reputation.
And just as, in the previous example in which
a morally concerned person would not read-
ily conclude that the mysterious green food
is avocado if her conclusion might result in
something unpleasant for a dining compan-
ion, the morally concerned colleague of Sem-
melweis would not have readily concluded
that there must be something wrong with
Semmelweis’s observations—even though,
under such conditions, there must have been
a strong pull to do so.
Moral open-mindedness is a hard virtue, not
an easy one. The failure of Semmelweis’s col-
leagues to acknowledge his arguments sug-
gests as much. The open-minded person is not
someone who has no opinion, but someone
who is prevented from being “opinionated”—
resistant to evidence—by moral concern, and
human nature seems to be such as to make this
a rare enough thing, when there is anything
substantial to resist. If open-mindedness were
as easy as lacking an opinion, Feyerabend’s
thinking about the Nazis would be exemplary
open-mindedness, but it is something quite
different. The case of young Feyerabend
shows that sometimes, not having an opin-
ion is the result of lack of moral concern.
Obsessed as he was with science and art, the
public affairs of Nazi Austria, including such
things as the beating of Jewish children in his
school, did not interest Feyerabend enough
for him to have an opinion about them, the
way that a person who is not interested in
golf usually has no opinion as to the rela-
tive talents of particular golfers. Feyerabend
himself unblinkingly admits his lack of moral
concern at the time when he says that during
“all these events” it never occurred to him
to inquire further, as “the idea that the fate
of any single human being was in some way
connected to my own existence was entirely
outside my field of vision.”20 It appears that
not only did Feyerabend not posses the moral
virtue of open-mindedness, but that he was
led to lack an opinion by the same thing that
causes some people to be closed-minded:
lack of moral concern. There are times when,
to paraphrase yeats, the best lack all convic-
tion, but there are times when those who lack
conviction are clearly among the bad. In the
case of Feyerabend, we might speculate the
same sort of thing that led certain people to
be dogmatic in his circumstances is exactly
what led him to have no opinion, namely, a
lack of concern for morality. Nothing could
be further from a moral virtue.
So far the focus has been upon open-
mindedness as a moral virtue, and this is
bound to have led to some objections arising
in the minds of readers. On the present ac-
count, the person who opens her mind out of
anything other than moral concern—even if
it is concern for the truth—does not have the
moral virtue of open-mindedness, though she
might have an epistemic virtue of the same
name. An expression of concern for the truth
is not always expression of a concern for
morality: consider the scientist who performs
dangerous experiments, or, more lightly,
consider the philosopher who cannot help, in
the middle of a funeral, but to try to convince
her host that there is no god, a proposition
which she takes to be an important truth. The
truth seeker seeks the truth, but the morally
concerned person qua morally concerned per-
son only need care about the truth when the
truth is morally salient, when there are moral
stakes. Some will hold that the truth is always
morally salient, as any false belief is capable
of causing a harmful action. If that is true,
the morally concerned person and the truth-
concerned person would be well advised to
act in the same way, and will be similarly
 OPEN-MINdEdNESS AS A MOrAl VIrTUE /
nonvoluntarily moved in their beliefs, but
even then, there will always be the question
of whether it is concern for what is moral or
concern for the truth (or some combination of
the two) that moves the agent to act in some
way or to be influenced in some way. There
may be both a moral and an epistemic virtue
of open-mindedness, in the same way that
some think courage can be a moral virtue
and a prudential one. Sometimes a person’s
consideration of evidence she wants not to
consider shows her moral concern, and at
other times it shows her epistemic concern,
in just the way that a person’s failure to lie
to a boss is sometimes a sign of honesty,
sometimes of prudence.
Another objection is likely to arise in the
astute reader: does the present proposal
not lend itself to a neurotic level of concern
for the facts, recommending an obsessive-
compulsive relation to the truth as the path
of virtue? Can there be such a thing as too
much moral concern leading to morally bad
results? One might analogously ask if too
much concern for self-interest can cause
one to act imprudently. It sometimes appears
that it does. Suppose that george cares a fair
amount about his self-interest and is also
very fearful. As a result, he ends up being
neurotic about things that he perceives have
a bearing on his self-interest. Very concerned
about thieves, he becomes unable to leave the
house without checking ten times that he has
locked the door. Very concerned about money,
he becomes so scared of financial ruin that he
harms himself by making poor investment de-
cisions, leaving all his money in safe deposit
boxes. In this case, it might appear that if he
were less concerned with his self-interest, he
would also not have had his neurotic fears and
would not have compromised his self-interest
in the way he does.
But the root of george’s problem is not
really too much concern for his self-interest.
There can be people who are considerably
more self-interested than george and yet who
83
do not have his symptoms. george’s prob-
lems arise because, with a normal amount
of concern for his self-interest, he also has
a tendency (still poorly understood by either
scientists or philosophers) to become un-
nerved in high-stakes situations. Without his
considerable concern for his self-interest,
locking his door and taking care of his money
would not have been high-stakes situations,
it can be agreed, but the real problem is with
his reaction to high-stakes situations, not
his concern for his self-interest. It might
be that the conditional if George were less
interested in his self-interest he would have
fewer problems holds true, but the truth of the
conditional does not diagnose what distin-
guishes george as someone with a problem.
And once that diagnosis is made, it appears
that it would be a mistake to fault george’s
self-interest.
Who would be the counterpart of george
in open-mindedness? Consider Trisha, who
is very concerned with the moral import of
her opinions, and who often fails to come to
a conclusion when considering moral mat-
ters. She finds herself saying things such as,
“I just don’t know what to think. However
I make up my mind it seems that I’m con-
demning someone who might not deserve it,
or agreeing with someone who might be in
the wrong.” She listens for too long to views
that she should dismiss, trying for charitable
interpretations, and she fears making any
negative judgment at all about a member of
another culture or race unless the person is
as obviously bad as a Nazi is. As a result, she
fails to hold the beliefs that a reasonable and
judicious moral reasoner in her circumstances
would hold. As with george, one might
suspect that Trisha is a character who has
a problem caused by an excess of concern.
But again, this appears to be a misdiagnosis.
A person who is even more concerned with
morality than Trisha need not have her ten-
dency to epistemic paralysis, and typically
will not (if the lives of Nelson Mandela,
84 / AMErICAN PHIlOSOPHICAl QUArTErly

Martin luther King Jr., and other people of
known profound moral concern are anything
to judge by). The most reasonable diagnosis
of Trisha’s problem is that it stems from her
overblown anxiety surrounding moral judg-
ment and not from her moral concern itself.
As in the case of george, it might be true
that the conditional if Trisha were less mor-
ally concerned she would reach better moral
judgments holds, but also as in the case of
george, it would seem to be a mistake to read
off from the truth of this conditional that her
moral concern is what specifically is wrong
with Trisha.
Feyerabend, Trisha, and the open-minded
person can look similar to one another at first
glance. Furthermore, closed-minded people
often feel that they have a “fair and balanced”
view of the world and that other people are
closed-minded with respect to them. Thus,
open-mindedness is not only a hard virtue
but a virtue whose presence or absence it is
very hard to diagnose in oneself, like mod-
esty. As we all tend to think that people are
unfair to us, it is even hard to diagnose in one
another, at least in daily life, where we lack
the solid facts of the hypothetical case study.
While it is not within the scope of this essay
to try to provide diagnostic criteria for open-
mindedness, hopefully it has clarified what it
is that we humans should try to have when we
try for open-mindedness: not a disposition to
have no opinion whatsoever, but a disposition
to change our beliefs without being opinion-
ated, a disposition engendered specifically
by moral concern. And perhaps this in turn
has suggested more generally how cognitive
dispositions, even nonvoluntary ones, can be
morally significant.
Brown University

NOTES
The author would like to thank david Christiansen, James dreier, david Estlund, an anonymous ref-
eree, and audiences at the Virtue/Vice conference at Cal-Fulerton, at The Chapel Hill Colloquium, at
Columbia University, at Ohio State University, and at the University of Toronto.
1. J. Adler, “reconciling Open-Mindedness and Belief,” Theory and Research in Education, vol. 22
(2004), pp. 127–142, and W. riggs, “Open-mindedness” (unpublished article), think it is a different
purely cognitive state: awareness of one’s fallibility as a knower.
2. N. Arpaly, Merit, Meaning, and Human Bondage: An Essay on Free Will (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
3. See N. Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Human Agency (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003). This essay is about moral, rather than epistemic, virtue. When it comes to epistemic as
opposed to moral, virtues, the view that any disposition conducive to good belief-forming is a virtue
is held, for example, by Sosa and greco, whereas others, such as Zagzebski and Montmarquet, hold
the epistemic virtues to be similar to the moral ones in that motives are involved. See l. Zagzesbki,
Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); E. Sosa, A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Re-
flective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); J. greco, “Virtues and Vices of Virtue
Epistemology,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 23 (1993), pp. 413–432; and J. Montmarquet,
Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Boston: rowman and littlefield, 1993).
4. As is the case with Julia driver, in her Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2000).
 OPEN-MINdEdNESS AS A MOrAl VIrTUE / 85

6. Though not necessarily under that description. See Arpaly (2003).

7. P. Feyerabend, Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, p. 55.
8. A. lazar, “Self-deception: deceiving Oneself or Self-deceived?” Mind, vol. 108, pp.265–290.
9. What follows is not meant as a contribution to that particular debate but, tangential to it, an obser-
vation of interest for present purposes.
10. See J. Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
11. Nor is there space here to devise a more precise idea as to what “practical” is; for my present pur-
poses one is not needed.
12. Better: is the substantive content of morality, whatever exactly that might be (to not do harm, per-
haps; to respect the power for rational choice in others; etc.).
13. This fact, and the next listed effect, make the morally concerned agent somewhat similar to the
virtuous agent as described in J. Mcdowell, “Virtue and reason,” The Monist, vol. 62 (1979), pp.
331–350.
14. What, the chronically conscientious reader might ask, of cases where the agent is too—sensitive,
seeing duties and offenses where there are none? This will be discussed at the end of the essay. In the
meantime, the phrase “other things being equal” should be emphasized.
15. This invites the language of what guy Axtel, in “recent Work on Virtue Epistemology,” American
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 34 (1997), pp. 1–26, calls responsibilism—but without the attendant
epistemic voluntarism.
16. P. Foot, “Virtues and Vices,” in his Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
17. See M. Huemer, “Why People Are Irrational about Politics” (unpublished article).
18. A classic source is l. Festinger and J. Carlsmith, “Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance.”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 58 (1959), pp. 203–210.
19. The theory is also somewhat suspect in that it suggests there is something epistemically harmful
about wanting not to have inconsistent beliefs—which is, after all, an epistemic virtue.
20. Feyerabend, Killing Time, p. 41.
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