Philosophy Speakers Program: Julia Driver (Washington), “Appraisability and Accountability”

This paper seeks to articulate and defend a view implicit in Hume: that some beings are morally appraisable even though they are not moral agents. The view falls out of Hume’s minimalist account of virtue, as a quality of the mind the spectator finds pleasing from the general point of view, along with his more demanding views on agency, and the meta-cognitive self-regulation required for moral agency. I try to defend the thesis by tying it into current discussions in the moral responsibility literature on different types of responsibilitiy/appraisability arguing for a category of moral appraisability that is minimalist in Hume’s sense, but nevertheless distinct from mere ‘grading’ or ‘sorting’.

Location:

Social Sciences Room 1253

Speaker:

Julia Driver, Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests are primarily in normative ethical theory, moral psychology, and Humean accounts of moral agency. She is the author of Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge 2001), Ethics: The Fundamentals (Blackwell 2006), and Consequentialism (Routledge 2012), as well as articles in journals such as Philosophical Studies, Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy, Nous, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and others. She is co-editor of the online journal The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, as well as co-editor of the Normative Ethics section of the online encyclopedia, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She has received a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellowship from Princeton University, a Young Scholar’s Award from Cornell University’s Program on Ethics and Public Life, and an NEH Fellowship. Driver will be visiting Oxford University during Trinity Term 2014 on an HLA Hart Fellowship.

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/philosophy-speakers-program-julia-driver-washington-appraisability-and-accountability