Nine Intellectual Virtues

Either universities appoint and promote professors who display and disseminate intellectual virtues, or they reward those who exemplify and cultivate intellectual vices.

University of Washington, Seattle. Photo by Helen Ngoc N. on Unsplash

A suite of corrosive intellectual practices, often perpetrated by senior academics, have spread in some of the world’s most prestigious universities. These include smears by association, pulling of professional rank, careless misrepresentation, straw-manning, unjust bias, false assertion, axiomatic ideological abstraction, and evasive omission. As a result, moral vices like malice, arrogance, impatience, injustice, unfairness, dishonesty, and cowardice have become widespread.

Moreover, what is spread in the lecture hall or seminar room doesn’t stay there. Graduate bankers, businessmen, healthcare staff, military professionals, journalists, civil servants, politicians, and government ministers who absorb these vices can inflict serious damage on institutions and the individuals who inhabit or depend upon them. For that reason, we cannot afford universities that are eloquent about transferable skills but speechless about transferable virtues.

Universities face a choice. Either they appoint and promote professors who display and disseminate intellectual vices, or they reward those who exemplify and cultivate intellectual virtues.

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First among those virtues should be temperance—the restraint of emotions or passions. We live in a culture that vaunts passion and strong emotion as signs of authenticity and vitality. But emotions can lie. They do not lie about their own felt strength, of course. But they are based on perceptions, and perceptions can be untrue, embodying a lie about what is perceived. Passions may blind and deafen us to truths we ought to see and hear, including the duties we owe others. If we are going to be able to see straight, listen carefully, think clearly, and treat other people as they deserve, we need to cultivate temperance.

Temperance or self-control is the necessary condition of a second virtue: respect. On first encounter, other people deserve the presumption of good faith, so when they speak or write, we should assume that they are earnestly expressing the truth as they see it. We should not assume that they are simply rationalising some unjust interest or advantage. Accordingly, we should begin by attending to what people say, rather than trying to discredit it by insinuating or smearing or damning by association. Of course, it may be that the more we attend, the more apparent it becomes that they are not acting in good faith. Very well. But our initial stance should be to give people the benefit of the doubt.

If we are going to show respect, we will also need to exercise a third virtue: carefulness. When reporting what someone has said or written, we should take care to reproduce their words accurately, without omitting inconvenient words or passages, distorting others, and turning the intended meaning into a straw man. It may seem that accuracy in reportage is too elementary and prosaic a skill to merit adult attention. But many adults have never learned it, because their teachers never taught or rewarded the virtue of carefulness. Consequently, we have journalists, politicians, and decorated university professors who misrepresent their opponents, thereby misleading many others. Being careful with a person’s words, so as to hear and report them accurately is a basic form of doing them justice.

The fourth virtue is that of patience. If what someone is saying is unfamiliar or complex, careful listening may require time. The word “patience” derives from the same Latin root as “passion,” but it means the opposite. It is a species of emotional self-control that enables us to endure frustration and discomfort. Sometimes, what others write or say can be uncertain, inconsistent, or opaque. We should do our best to try to understand what is intended.

This brings us to our fifth virtue: charity, or generosity. When Barack Obama was an attorney, it is said that he would open his case by scrupulously summarising the position of his opponent in its strongest form. Only then did he set about dismantling it. Such charitable practice is not only kind, it is also rhetorically optimal and most likely to win the trust of impartial observers. And it brings precision to the criticism that follows, making that criticism more effective.

Unless we intend to mistake ourselves for gods, we will be aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws. So, when we first encounter someone else’s speech or writing, we should do so with a sixth virtue, humility. We should face an opponent as an equal, subjecting ourselves to the common rules of evidence and reason. We may have higher professional status and we may be much celebrated, but we should not take ourselves too seriously. We should acknowledge that authorities will sometimes be wrong, especially if they are arrogant, and that amateurs will sometimes be right, especially if they are temperate, careful, patient, and charitable. It is not uncommon for truth to speak from an unlikely quarter.

Humility implies the seventh virtue of docility or teachableness. Aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws, we should be open to the possibility that we have things to learn and that we might be mistaken in what we think we know. We should therefore always be “docile”—not in the sense of being blindly submissive, but in the original sense of being open to instruction and correction.

If we exercise the virtues of temperance, carefulness, respect, patience, charity, humility, and docility, we will also exercise an eighth virtue: that of thoughtfulness. We will allow the difference between what we have assumed and what another says to provoke the kind of reflection that allows us to think and rethink.

Finally, we should exercise the virtue of courage. To be temperate, respectful, careful, patient, charitable, humble, docile, and thoughtful also makes us vulnerable. That is because, by allowing another person to express their disagreement clearly, we may find some of our most cherished convictions are challenged, threatened, or even overturned. And bound up with those convictions may be a career’s worth of reputation, rewards, and accumulated social status. It is brave, indeed, to give another person the freedom to speak clearly.

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There is no neutral position available. If universities do not teach these nine virtues, they will, in effect, teach their opposing vices: intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, impatience, bad faith, arrogance, obduracy, thoughtlessness, and cowardice.

Professors can teach these virtues by rewarding their exercise; by prescribing texts that illustrate them and provoke reflection and discussion; and, most important of all, by modelling them in their own conduct. The best way to teach virtue is to be virtuous. Ultimately, vice-chancellors, university managers, and professors have a moral choice to make. Either they promote the virtues that make graduate citizens capable of being intellectually scrupulous or they do not.

Granted, there is no universal consensus on what should count as a virtue and what should count as a vice. Confucius held that deference to political authority is a virtue, but not resistance to it, while Martin Luther King did not. The ancient Hebrew prophets believed that care for the weak and the poor was virtuous, while Nietzsche and Ayn Rand did not. Jesus taught that humility, compassion, and forgiveness are virtues, but Aristotle did not. Some people think that respect should be promoted, while others prefer tolerance. And I think myself that compassion and kindness are only virtues in certain circumstances. In others—where, for example, military commanders have to put their own troops in harm’s way, or surgeons have to perform amputations without anaesthetics, or university managers have to make colleagues redundant, or professors have to award marks that cause students to fail—a certain thick-skinned quality may be a virtue.

There will always be room for further debate about the relative value of virtues. Consensus is usually tense in this sense, not entirely settled and relaxed. Nevertheless, universities should aim to reach whatever provisional consensus they can. For that to happen, however, its members need to wake up to the importance of what is at stake: namely, whether or not we are to have a society sufficiently devoted to the welfare of others that it cares to face uncomfortable or inconvenient truths.

In 1919, on the eve of civil war in Ireland, W.B. Yeats wrote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If we are to avoid a New Dark Age of repression and naked power-struggle, university leaders, managers, and professors need to recover the convictions of classical liberalism and reject the intense passion of its enemies.

This article was adapted from The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars by Nigel Biggar, 192 pages, Polity Books (February 2026).