Abstract

Can groups of people possess epistemic virtues? There has been some attention to this question in recent years in social epistemology and ethics. Interestingly, most defenses and criticisms of collective virtues so far have focused on proving or disproving that groups can have collective versions of individual virtues. Trying to or disprove that a group can have a good motivation that supervenes motivations of individuals, for example, is a typical strategy. But maybe group virtues are a completely different kind of animal. Does it make sense to demand that they resemble individual virtues? I propose that group virtues can be something different that individual virtues, and whether this is plausible or not depends on the theory we adopt about how virtues are grounded.