Julia Driver, Washington University - St. Louis

"Virtue and Moral Deference"A consensus seems to have arisen in the moral testimony literature that moral knowledge can be transmitted solely via testimony. However, some otherwriters, such as Alison Hills, hold that this is not as significant as it first appears, since the really important issue isn't knowledge, but, rather,understanding. On her view, reliance on testimony undermines moral understanding, which in turn undermines certain other things that we care about, such as moral worth and virtue. In this paper I assume, for the sake of argument, that understanding is very different from knowledge. My targets are some of the significance claims Hills makes for moral understanding. I argue that virtue requires responsible deference.