I enjoy reading lists of virtues and was particularly interested to find that Nigel Biggar has recently published a list of virtues for academics, which he terms nine intellectual virtues. These are:
- temperance
- respect
- carefulness
- patience
- charity, or generosity
- humility
- docility or teachableness
- thoughtfulness
- courage
Biggar is right to question whether universities can remain ‘eloquent about transferable skills while speechless about transferable virtues’. Explicit discussion of virtues is rare. The closest most universities come is through lists of graduate attributes. These combine flexible mindsets (curiosity, aspiration, global engagement), practical skills (research, critical thinking, communication), and thinly stated values (such as ethical awareness or social responsibility). While not wholly instrumental, they are largely structured around employability, adaptability, and contribution in a complex world. Even where they gesture toward qualities such as curiosity or responsibility, these are typically framed as transferable and demonstrable capacities rather than as formed dispositions ordered to the goods of inquiry. They are generalised across contexts and only lightly connected to disciplinary traditions or standards of excellence, and they operate with a diffuse and weakly articulated sense of ends.
Intellectual virtues, by contrast, are stable dispositions of character ordered to the intrinsic goods of inquiry: truth-seeking, sound judgement, and intellectual integrity, sustained even under pressure. There is overlap in content, but a difference in depth and grounding. Graduate attributes tend to describe desirable capacities in a generalised and outcome-oriented way; intellectual virtues articulate the qualities required to pursue knowledge well within practices and traditions of enquiry. One offers a thin and largely instrumental formation; the other aims at the cultivation of intellectual excellence.
Biggar argues that such intellectual virtues cannot simply be assumed; they must be deliberately taught, above all by being modelled in everyday academic conduct. He acknowledges that there is no settled consensus on what counts as a virtue, yet insists universities must nevertheless work toward some provisional agreement.
But even if virtues are modelled, this presumes that academics can reliably recognise them in themselves and others – an assumption that is doubtful. Many academics already believe they are doing precisely that. The deeper difficulty, therefore, is not simply a failure to model virtues or to agree upon them, but the fallibility of moral self-understanding. As Alasdair MacIntyre, following Thomas Aquinas, emphasises, all action aims at some perceived good – yet what appears good may in fact be only an apparent good. Under conditions of moral pluralism, where no shared framework of reasoning commands general assent, such errors become harder to diagnose and correct.
That said, Biggar’s list has much to recommend it, not least its inclusion of charity, which Aquinas regarded as the form of all virtues.
From a classical and MacIntyrean perspective, however, any list of academic virtues risks remaining abstract if detached from a clear account of the goods to which those virtues are ordered. In the classical tradition, virtues are intelligible only in relation to such goods and to the practices through which they are pursued. As Aquinas argues, virtues are stable dispositions ordered to ends; for MacIntyre, they are acquired through participation in coherent practices directed toward internal goods. This is why we need not just virtues as such but what MacIntyre terms a ‘systematic and coherent account of the virtues’ (see: How to seem virtuous without actually being so) – Aristotle’s account, for example.
The more fundamental question is therefore not only which virtues academics should possess, but what goods academic work is ordered toward, and how participation in its practices forms the kinds of judgement and character those goods require. Recovering a clearer sense of those internal goods, for example, truthful inquiry, rigorous yet generous criticism, and the formation of trustworthy intellectual character, would help universities move towards not only a provisional agreement on the virtues but a more coherent shared moral framework.
(Benozzo Gozzoli: Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas)
