ABSTRACT
The claim that normative epistemology should be regarded as the ethics of belief may be seen as less contentious than it is often taken to be, provided we treat 'ethics' as a marker term holding place for the diversity in approaches to be found in normative ethics. However, if one's ethics is consequentialist we get a commitment to epistemic externalism; and if a virtue ethics we get a commitment to virtue epistemology. One problem in assessing the prospects for virtue theory in epistemology is that this position has tended to be all things to all people. Some virtue theorists are 'virtue responsibilists' and some are 'virtue reliabilists'. Virtue theories may perhaps be seen as a new set of theories in epistemology, but despite frequent claims to the contrary they do not offer us a new species of epistemic value, a new epistemic axiological kind—a distinct and underivative source of specifically aretaic value.
