Collective Moral and Intellectual Virtues - Summer Course

Collectives and other groups have the capacity to do more than any of their individual members could accomplish alone. Groups can achieve great accomplishments and benefits, but they can also commit evil at scale. Likewise, through the division of cognitive labor and with the support of technologies of communication and inference, collectives can learn things that no individual could achieve in a lifetime. However, collectives can also spread misinformation, disinformation, unwarranted conspiracy theories, and propaganda at hitherto-unimagined speed and scale. 

This course addresses both the promise and the peril that attend our increasingly connected, global community. It offers participants the chance to think through the ethical difficulties of existence within contemporary communities, and consider how to construct those communities in ways that enable us to flourish together as moral, epistemic, and political agents. We will begin with an introduction to individual virtue theory (both ethical and epistemic), then expand to a consideration of collective virtue theory.

Philosophers have developed accounts not only of the virtues but also detailed accounts of the vices that oppose and undermine them. The fields of both vice ethics and vice epistemology have grown in recent years. Many of these vices only exist in collective contexts because they presuppose various forms of complex sociality. Interdisciplinary scholars have also developed more thorough accounts of not only individual but also collective virtues and vices, as well as the relationship between individual and collective virtues and vices. The resulting understanding of cognitive technologies and the forms that cognitive conflict can take informs our thinking about what virtue is up against, and what it consists of. 

The team of teachers of this course has experience with both theorizing and conducting empirical studies, using methods from psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Financial aid is available. 

Application deadline: 2026 March 1.