ABSTRACT
One of the achievements of virtue epistemology has been the identification of an array of epistemic virtues that had not previously been distinguished or focused on in traditional epistemology. By contrast, the summative model of institutional ethos would cast institutions or institutional bodies within broader institutions (faculties within a university, or squads within a police force) as capable of having an ethos only as a matter of the aggregate of individual officers’ value commitments. These may or may not be adequately consistent to add up to a coherent ethos, and so for any such aggregation of individual values it will remain an open question whether they amass into a coherent ethos or not. Epistemic vices, like vices in general, can pertain to acts or behaviours, and they can pertain to agents.
