Moral intellectualism or ethical intellectualism is a view in meta-ethics according to which genuine moral knowledge must take the form of arriving at discursive moral judgements about what one should do. In other words, virtue is knowledge: if you know what is right, you will do what is right.
Ancient moral intellectualism
In the view of Socrates (469–399 BC), intellectualism allows that “one will do what is right or best just as soon as one truly understands what is right or best”; that virtue is a purely intellectual matter, since virtue and knowledge are cerebral relatives, which a person accrues and improves with dedication to reason. So defined, Socratic intellectualism became a key philosophic doctrine of Stoicism. The Stoics are well known for their teaching that the good is to be identified with virtue.
The apparent, problematic consequences of this view are “Socratic paradoxes”, such as the view that there is no weakness of will — that no one knowingly does, or seeks to do, evil (moral wrong); that anyone who does, or seeks to do, moral wrong does so involuntarily; and that virtue is knowledge, that there are not many virtues, but that all virtues are one. The following are among the so-called Socratic Paradoxes:
Contemporary philosophers dispute that Socrates’s conceptions of knowing truth, and of ethical conduct, can be equated with modern, post–Cartesian conceptions of knowledge and of rational intellectualism. As such, Michel Foucault demonstrated, with detailed historical study, that in Classical Antiquity (800 BC – AD 1000), “knowing the truth” is akin to “spiritual knowledge”, in the contemporarily understanding of the concept. Hence, without exclusively concerning the rational intellect, spiritual knowledge is integral to the broader principle of “caring for the self”.
Typically, such care of the self-involved specific ascetic exercises meant to ensure that not only was knowledge of truth memorized, but learned, and then integrated to the self, in the course of transforming oneself into a good person. Therefore, to understand truth meant “intellectual knowledge” requiring one’s integration to the (universal) truth, and authentically living it in one’s speech, heart, and conduct. Achieving that difficult task required continual care of the self, but also meant being someone who embodies truth, and so can readily practice the Classical-era rhetorical device of parrhesia: “to speak candidly, and to ask forgiveness for so speaking”; and, by extension, practice the moral obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk. This ancient, Socratic moral philosophic perspective contradicts the contemporary understanding of truth and knowledge as rational undertakings.