In this book, Driver challenges Aristotle's classical theory of virtue.

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.

Driver challenges Aristotle's classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues that do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Modesty, for example, is generally considered to be a virtue even though the modest person may be making an inaccurate assessment of his or her accomplishments. She argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective that holds that virtue is simply a character trait that systematically produces good consequences.

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 underlying utilitarian theory: what value is to be specified and how it is to be maximized. Driver also...