Furloughs and Class Cancellations: Please note that the roughly 10% pay cut for University staff and faculty, implemented by furloughing us two days per month, remains in effect for this coming semester. (The debate over whether to continue furloughs next year is now shaping up.) I will be furloughed on the following days: January 15th and 28th; February 11th and 19th; March 12th and 30th; April 8th and 23rd; and May 6th and 17th. Not all of these involve class cancellations. For this course, three of the roughly forty-five class meetings will be cancelled. And, though it has not yet been settled that I can go (since there is not the usual travel money from the college to support it), I have been invited to make two presentations at Manchester University in England during the week of April 11th through 17th--if I do go, then there may be more class cancellations, though I will ask colleagues to fill in one or more of those days or will have substitute learning activities. Finally, the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division conference will be in San Francisco March 31st through April 4, and I am scheduled to present commentary on a paper by Prof. Simo Saatela of University of Bergen in Norway for the North American Wittgenstein Society. That Friday's class will either have a substitute or will be cancelled with a library project to do in lieu of class.
Description: Ethics is one of the central subdisciplines in philosophy. It is the study of morality: moral decision making, moral judgments, moral problems and issues. One way of studying these things is to review the main theories philosophers have offered. Another is to take up particular moral problems and articulate the main arguments for all the possible positions, and see where that takes us. The title and the catalog description of this course commit us to a review of theories. But we will also contrast that theoretical work with the work we can do on particular moral problems with no theory to guide us, and we will address a current philosophical issue of how to evaluate the theories.We will first go data collecting. We will collect and list some examples of things people have done or might do which would raise moral issues, and array those before us to keep in mind as we look at philosophical accounts. Then we will learn the theories: we will take up divine command theories; Aristotelian virtue ethics; Kantian ethics of good will, duty, and logical consistency; Mill's utilitarianism (which holds that the moral action is that which has the consequence of contributing to the most happiness for the greatest number of people possible); and perhaps some other contemporary theories. We will consider issues between absolutists and relativists (that is, between those who say we must have one guiding authority for all and those who say that what is moral is relative to one's culture or one's values). Results there are fairly likely to bring up the problem of what ethics is for.
Texts and Materials: All readings will either be posted to Moodle, the University's web-based course materials management site, or will be handed out in class. You need not buy anything.
You will need to access Moodle frequently in order to do your required reading. Since some of
the files will be large and since some of them will print as twenty or thirty pages, you may choose
to use the computer labs on campus rather than your home machine in order to save download
times or paper. In general I will have saved readings as .pdf files in order to increase the word counts per page so we can save paper. For
several of the readings I have already written short, simple multiple-choice quizzes, and if it seems members
of the class are not doing the readings I will hand those out with no notice. Though I don't return these quizzes, I will post a key.
While some of the readings are difficult, the reading load is well within the standard
expectation that students will spend two hours preparing for each hour of class. Some of that preparation time will include reviewing and critiqueing what is read.
The readings are a necessary part of the course, but most central to the course is what
happens in class, in lectures and discussions. We will be critiquing the theories, and those
critiques will be more important parts of this course than learning what the theories say. Some
students in the past have been slow to catch on to this, and it made the course much more
difficult for them. Conversely, if you can learn to like being allowed to think independently of
the texts, you may enjoy the course more.
Requirements and Grading: Students will write four 2000-word essays over the semester, in
accordance with General Education and departmental guidelines for this type of course. For each essay, I will
distribute four to six questions at least one week ahead of the date they are due, and you will
choose one to write on. Each question will be an extended quote containing an argument on one
of the issues we take up. You will write each essay in three parts, as follows:
Part One: Discuss and clarify the issue to which the quote is addressed, and describe the
writer's argument using the strategies developed in class (keep your own views out of Part One);
Part Two: tell what you think the speaker of the quote should have said, and provide
strong support–that is, argue for your own views;
Part Three: Give and answer the strongest objections that could be raised to your own views, those
you presented in Part Two.
Send essays e-mail if at all convenient. Do not send attachments. Paste your essay into the body
of a message to me, with "Phil 303" and your name on the subject line and as the first line of
your message. Do not double space or waste space with formatting. Do give your essay a good
title. Each essay is due at the beginning of class on the due date, which will be prominent on each
assignment.
Provided the attendance requirement is met, your grade for the course will be the average
of your essay grades, except that if your last three essays average higher, that will be your grade
instead.
Attendance is required. No one who misses more than five classes (out of about
forty-five) will receive a grade higher than a B, and no one who misses more than ten
classes will receive higher than a C. Each quiz on which a student gets less than 60% will count as an absence.
Schedule: (This is only a rough model of how the course will go--in fact, our pace depends on our success at getting to and then through the crucial issues. I did not say, though students have attributed to me, "the better our work, the slower our progress." The pace will also change depending on class interests, difficulties in understanding Kant, problems with particular critiques, and so on.)
Goals and Objectives: This course is one of the requirements for the philosophy major, and sometimes serves students beginning the major as an orientation. Other philosophy majors take the course in the middle or toward the end of their major. But it also is a part of Humboldt State's General Education program, as one of the courses meeting the Upper Division Area C Requirement. This sometimes causes difficulties in the course--some of the philosophy majors may be interested in working at a more advanced level, but the course is designed as an introduction and survey. In previous semesters, some of the non-majors have done a better job at clarifying the main issues than the majors have. For this course, being able to identify areas outside of philosophy where our work raises real stakes or has implications for the world outside philosophy is a crucial skill.
Selected Texts via links: Main access to these is through Moodle.
First, a copy of Plato's Euthyphro,
which articulates one divine command theory of ethics and then critiques it in such a way that the critique may easily be generalized. In fact, the critique is corrosive of theories of ethics in general. Thus, it begins the work on the issues of how to evaluate ethical theories, with a very strong position: ethical theories can never be more important than particular issues and the arguments made relevant by those issues.
Third Theory: Immanuel Kant's theory of foundations in duty, good will, and logical consistency
Fourth Theory: John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which makes whether an action contributes to human happiness the key to that action's moral value.
After working through those four theories, we will ask some questions about the value of what we have done and how to evaluate the theories. We will also take up questions of the relation of morals to culture, questions regarding whether there is some common basis to morality for all, problems of moral relativism vs. moral absolutes, and the question, "why should I be good?" Most of those readings will be accessed through Moodle.
This course focuses on primary texts. It may be you will wish to find extra help, especially when you are assigned to do research. If you seek out secondary sources, be careful not to lose track of the critiques we will do in class, which will be keyed to the primary texts and which will usually be much more selective than the secondary literature. Depending on which theory you are working on, the best secondary sources will be different. For secondary sources, the Ethics Theories website at UC San Diego may be a good start. For example, for Aristotle, both Steven Darwall's lectures and a powerpoint and Realvideo lecture by Lawrence Hinman (this site originated as Hinman's project) are helpful. Again, some of the critiques we will develop are not dealt with on this site, so don't use it as the final word. Here's the address for the Theories page, but it's easy to move up from there to more abstract views:
There are also particular sites given to Kantian and Utilitarian ethics, and to divine command ethics. Most of those sites are not balanced with criticism but tend to feature writers who are advocates for the particular theories. You can also easily find sites which argue for cultural relativism, evolution as a source of divine commands, nihilism (there's no such thing as morality, really), or Reichian Orgone therapy or sado-machism or LSD as keys to ethics--but it may be harder to find balance or critiques. Wikipedia resources can be a help as long as you are properly paranoid about their tendencies to be shaped by the current standard views on the one hand and by theoretical fads on the other. Better bets are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, though they are not yet nearly as complete as some expensive paper encyclopediae are, like The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Schilp and a formidable crew of philosophical referees, and the new Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online access to some of these hard copy references, such as the Brittanica, is available through the HSU library. Finally, depending on your topic, you can be inundated under a tsunami of references through The Philosophers' Index, which indexes and abstracts articles and books from hundreds of philosophical journals and publishers worldwide, and which is accessible through our library.
Outcomes Assessment; Some of you know that I have been working on philosophical problems with the move to require accountability in higher ed by imposing programs of outcomes assessments. I now have a manuscript (under consideration at the journal Thought and Action) which I'll be happy to share. It develops further some claims I made in an article ten years ago in that same journal on what education is for, which is available online through their archive--send me a note if you want a link. In brief, I am now convinced that the implementation of requirements that all professors set aside time to measure learning outcomes, though it may have some good effects in those places where the teaching is really shitty or is at a very low level (e.g. in which students are acting as recording devices), is destructive of excellence in good courses and displaces analytical and critical work, finally harming students and the society rather than helping. Again, I am willing to share that draft. If, though, you wish to look over the department's documents regarding our learning outcomes, send me a note.