Julia Driver

University of Texas at Austin
University of St. Andrews
Johns Hopkins University
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Austin, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory
Meta-Ethics
Normative Ethics
Areas of Interest
Value Theory
  •  1857
    Ethics: The Fundamentals
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2006.
    _Ethics: The Fundamentals_ explores core ideas and arguments in moral theory by introducing students to different philosophical approaches to ethics, including virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, divine command theory, and feminist ethics. The first volume in the new Fundamentals of Philosophy series. Presents lively, real-world examples and thoughtful discussion of key moral philosophers and their ideas. Constitutes an excellent resource for readers coming to the subject of ethics for the first time
  •  510
    The suberogatory
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (3). 1992.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  473
    The virtues of ignorance
    Journal of Philosophy 86 (7): 373-384. 1989.
    In The Virtues of Ignorance the author demonstrates that classical theories of virtue are flawed and developes a consequentialist theory of virtue. ;Virtues are excellences of character. They are traits which are considered to be valuable in some way. A person who is virtuous is one who has a tendency to act well. Classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, believed that virtues, as human excellences, could not involve ignorance in any way. On their view, the virtuous agent, when acting…Read more
  •  337
    Autonomy and the Asymmetry Problem for Moral Expertise
    Philosophical Studies 128 (3): 619-644. 2006.
    We seem less likely to endorse moral expertise than reasoning expertise or aesthetic expertise. This seems puzzling given that moral norms are intuitively taken to be at least more objective than aesthetic norms. One possible diagnosis of the asymmetry is that moral judgments require autonomy of judgement in away that other judgments do not. However, the author points out that aesthetic judgments that have been ‘borrowed’ by aesthetic experts generate the same autonomy worry as moral judgments w…Read more
  •  328
    The history of utilitarianism
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.
  •  300
    Moral expertise: Judgment, practice, and analysis*: Julia driver
    Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 280-296. 2013.
    This essay defends moral expertise against the skeptical considerations raised by Gilbert Ryle and others. The core of the essay articulates an account of moral expertise that draws on work on expertise in empirical moral psychology, and develops an analogy between moral expertise and linguistic expertise. The account holds that expertise is contrastive, so that a person is an expert relative to a particular contrast. Further, expertise is domain specific and characterized by “automatic” behavio…Read more
  •  294
    Uneasy Virtue
    Cambridge University Press. 2001.
    The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to accoun…Read more
  •  245
    Imaginative resistance and psychological necessity
    Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1): 301-313. 2008.
    Some of our moral commitments strike us as necessary, and this feature of moral phenomenology is sometimes viewed as incompatible with sentimentalism, since sentimentalism holds that our commitments depend, in some way, on sentiment. His dependence, or contingency, is what seems incompatible with necessity. In response to this sentimentalists hold that the commitments are psychologically necessary. However, little has been done to explore this kind of necessity. In this essay I discuss psycholog…Read more
  •  223
    Virtue ethics has generated a great deal of excitement among ethicists largely because it is seen as an alternative to the traditional theories – utilitarianism and Kantian ethics – which have come under considerable scrutiny and criticism in the past 30 years. Rather than give up the enterprise of doing moral theory altogether, as some have suggested, others have opted to develop an alternative that would hopefully avoid the shortcomings of both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Several writer…Read more
  •  187
    Consequentialism and feminist ethics
    Hypatia 20 (4): 183-199. 2000.
    : This essay attempts to show that sophisticated consequentialism is able to accommodate the concerns that have traditionally been raised by feminist writers in ethics. Those concerns have primarily to do with the fact that consequentialism is seen as both too demanding of the individual and neglectful of the agent's special obligations to family and friends. Here, I argue that instrumental justification for partiality can be provided, for example, even though an attitude of partiality is not ch…Read more
  •  172
    Dream immorality
    Philosophy 82 (1): 5-22. 2007.
    This paper focuses on an underappreciated issue that dreams raise for moral evaluation: is immorality possible in dreams? The evaluatiotial internalist is committed to answering ‘yes.’ This is because the internalist account of moral evaluation holds that the moral quality of a person's actions, what a person does, her agency in any given case is completely determined by factors that are internal to that agency, such as the person's motives and/or intentions. Actual production of either good or …Read more
  •  166
    Response to my critics
    Utilitas 16 (1): 33-41. 2004.
    This essay is a rejoinder to comments on Uneasy Virtue made by Onora O'Neill, John Skorupski, and Michael Slote in this issue. In Uneasy Virtue I presented criticisms of traditional virtue theory. I also presented an alternative – a consequentialist account of virtue, one which is a form of ‘pure evaluational externalism’. This type of theory holds that the moral quality of character traits is determined by factors external to agency (e.g. consequences). All three commentators took exception to …Read more
  •  163
    Editorial: The Review Process
    Ethics 130 (1): 1-4. 2019.
  •  161
    The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue
    Metaphilosophy 34 (3): 367-383. 2003.
    Accounts of virtue suffer a conflation problem when they appear unable to preserve intuitive distinctions between types of virtue. In this essay I argue that a number of influential attempts to preserve the distinction between moral and epistemic virtues fail, on the grounds that they characterize virtuous traits in terms of ‘characteristic motivation’. I claim that this does not distinguish virtuous traits at the level of value‐conferring quality, and I propose that the best alternative is to d…Read more
  •  148
    On virtue ethics
    Philosophical Review 111 (1): 122-127. 2002.
    Rosalind Hursthouse has written an excellent book, in which she develops a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that she sees as avoiding some of the major criticisms leveled against virtue ethics in general, and against Aristotle's brand of virtue ethics in particular.
  •  148
  •  144
    Moralism
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 22 (2). 2005.
    abstract In this paper moralism is defined as the illicit use of moral considerations. Three different varieties of moralism are then discussed — moral absolutism, excessive standards and demandingness, and presenting non‐moral considerations as moral ones. Both individuals and theories can be regarded as moralistic in some of these senses. Indeed, some critics of consequentialism have regarded that theory as moralistic. The author then describes the problems associated with each sense of ‘moral…Read more
  •  130
    Normative Ethical theory underwent a period of refinement in some areas and proliferation in others during the 20th century. Theories prominent in the 19th century, such as Utilitarianism, underwent refinement in light of criticisms; other approaches, such as normative intuitionism and virtue ethics, were developed in new directions, ones that reflected the sophistication of analytical techniques developed by philosophers in the 20th century, particularly in ordinary language philosophy. The mid…Read more
  •  129
    Expertise and Evaluation
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 220-226. 2021.
  •  127
    Love and Unselfing in Iris Murdoch
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 87 169-180. 2020.
    Iris Murdoch believes that unselfing is required for virtue, as it takes us out of our egoistic preoccupations, and connects us to the Good in the world. Love is a form of unselfing, illustrating how close attention to another, and the way they really are, again, takes us out of a narrow focus on the self. Though this view of love runs counter to a view that those in love often overlook flaws in their loved ones, or at least down-play them, I argue that it is compatible with Murdoch's view that …Read more
  •  115
    Consequentialism
    Routledge. 2012.
    Consequentialism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of actions depend solely on their consequences. It is one of the most influential, and controversial, of all ethical theories. In this book, Julia Driver introduces and critically assesses consequentialism in all its forms. After a brief historical introduction to the problem, Driver examines utilitarianism, and the arguments of its most famous exponents, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and explains the fundamental questions under…Read more
  •  112
    Pleasure as the standard of virtue in Hume's moral philosophy
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (2). 2004.
    But in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the human mind (EPM, 173)
  •  112
    Humble arrogance
    Metaphilosophy 38 (4): 365-369. 2007.
    This essay defends consequentialist approaches to moral evaluation from a charge of moral arrogance made by Bernard Gert in “Moral Arrogance and Moral Theories.” A distinction is made between a commitment to there being a right answer to moral questions and certainty about the nature of the right answers.
  •  107
    Promises, obligations, and abilities
    Philosophical Studies 44 (2). 1983.
  •  99
    Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.
  •  95
    The Secret Chain: A Limited Defense of Sympathy
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1): 234-238. 2011.
    This paper responds to criticisms of sympathy-based approaches to ethics made by Jesse Prinz, focusing on the criticism that emotions are too variable to form a basis for ethics. I draw on the idea, articulated by early sentimentalists such as Hutcheson and Hume, that proper reliance on sympathy is subject to a corrective procedure in order, in part, to avoid the variability problem.
  •  90
    Moral sense and sentimentalism
    In Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 358. 2013.
    This chapter focuses on sentimentalism – the view that morality is based on sentiment – in particular, the sentiment of sympathy. Sentimentalism was historically articulated in opposition to two positions: Hobbesian egoism, in which morality is based on self-interest; and Moral Rationalism, which held that morality is based on reason alone. The Sentimentalists challenged both views, arguing that there is more to what motivates human beings than simple self-interest and that reason alone is insuf…Read more