I can’t resist this one even though the source I’m quoting evidently suffered a production catastrophe, which I’ll reproduce.
Virtue Epistemology:
Epistemology, of course, is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and provides the criteria for evidential warrant – it tells us when it is, in fact, rational to believe or disbelieve a given notion. Virtue epistemology is a particular approach within the field of epistemology, which takes its inspiration from virtue ethics. The latter is a general way to think about ethics that goes back to Aristotle and other ancient Greek and Roman thinkers.
Briefly, virtue ethics shifts thjat e [sic – perhaps the] focus from questions such as “Is this action right/wrong?” to “Is the character of this agent virtuous or not?” The idea is that morality is a human attribute, which has the purpose of improving our lives as individuals embedded in a broader society. As such, it does not yield itself to universal analyses that take a god’s eye-view of things, but rather starts with the individual as moral agent. [“The Virtuous Skeptic,” Massimo Pigliucci, Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2017), offline only]
