The following are courses which I have taught at least twice. They will continue to be modified in future, but these summaries give some indication of the thinking behind them. I am always keen to share teaching resources or to hear advice on good readings on these topics.
First Year Introductory Ethics
The aim here is first to offer a range of defences of reasoning about moral matters, starting with rejoinders to crude sorts of cultural relativism; second to have students recognising a difference between consequentialist and non-consequentialist approaches to ethics, and be able to make and respond to some basic arguments of each type. Readings include Hare 1979 ‘What is Wrong with Slavery?’, Dimock 2008 ‘Why All Feminists Should Be Contractarians‘, and MacIntyre 1981 ‘The Nature of The Virtues’. (Readings are intended to be interpreted and challenged in class.) Importantly, students are not pushed towards adopting one in particular of the Big Three approaches to normative ethics. However, there is discussion of why many philosophers might want a systematic account of right and wrong and might use first principles, ‘intuition pumps’, and reflective equilibrium to achieve this.
Metaethics is not discussed directly, but is introduced indirectly through the issue of blame and punishment (Eshleman 2014 ‘Moral Responsibility’), and the questions of ‘how ethical should we be?’ (Cullity 2003 ‘Asking Too Much’) and ‘how does/should morality relate to the socio-political order?’ (Williams 2005 ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’; Wall 2013 ‘Moral Environmentalism’).
I have usually not used a set text for the course, but it can be accompanied by Simon Blackburn’s Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, which is the best introductory text that I have encountered.
Second Year Bioethics
This course is designed to convey the importance of reasoned discussion of ethics to students who in many cases have not signed up for a philosophy major, and who might not have a past familiarity with or interest in the topics and methods. While each week has a separate topic in applied medical or scientific ethics, the course is tied together by three themes:
1) The ubiquity and complexity of values: this is illustrated early on e.g. with discussion of Levy 2013 ‘Addiction is not a brain disease (and it matters)’.
2) The role of physicians and scientists as authorities: Experts are trusted to make high-stakes decisions, provide testimony, and are often granted great professional privilege to operate outside of the norms and laws that govern the rest of us. To see why, we need to discuss where medical and scientific professionals fit into the ‘social ecology’ (the division of labour and authority, for example). What sort of governance is compatible with biomedical experts doing the jobs we want them to do, and what must they do to preserve the trust of the wider community? Chapter 3 of Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics is used as a reading, as it provides insightful discussion of the vast difference in perspective possible between professionals and their clients, and when a social ecology might fail some of its members.
3) The perceived distinction between therapy and enhancement: this distinction is very relevant to governing emerging technologies; it is also a topic that can become very complex and difficult, for example when paired with discussion of disability (reading from Wendell 1996 The Rejected Body).
I have taught the course both with and without Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics as a set text – it forms a good reference point for confused non-philosophy students, though does mean that fewer contentious papers can also be set as readings. Harris 1975 ‘The Survival Lottery’ is an easy and engaging paper for students, and its motives and method of argument can be referred back to throughout the course.
Second Year Applied Ethics
The title I have been given for this course is ‘Contemporary Moral Problems’, and the latest iteration of it leans heavily on each part of this title. The problems are ‘moral’ in the sense of concerning mores – concerning not just individual conscience, but the behaviours, institutions, and norms which shape society. And it is ‘contemporary’ in that I try to focus on problems of peculiarly contemporary relevance, ones which are not just the focus of ongoing and urgent academic and societal discussion, but which in some respect were not given such attention (say) a generation ago. This often means that the problems are linked to emerging technologies. This sort of contemporariness has the advantage of allowing students to contribute directly to important community debates and government consultations, and to potentially find truly novel solutions to the problems facing us – while other issues may be equally important, they tend to be well-trodden ground. It has the drawback that there is a greater risk of the material presented being rendered obsolete by technological, political, or academic upheavals, even within the timeframe of a semester. This risk is mitigated somewhat by situating contemporary problems within a longer historical narrative.
The course begins with several weeks on the notions of morality, moral philosophy, and ‘the community’. The point is both to revise some general moral philosophy, and to examine the particular problems and possibilities of interacting with others with whom we do not have a broad shared moral understanding or perhaps even a shared legal framework.
The course continues with four two-week blocks:
Privacy: Privacy is a peculiarly contemporary value, which relates in interesting ways to dignity, pluralism, freedom, and politics. This block looks first at the European history of privacy (reading is Constant’s ‘Rights of the Moderns’, but would be Geuss’s far better 2001 Public Goods, Private Goods if that book wasn’t a bit too long). We then move on to the question of whether privacy has a future in a world of big data and smart cities.
Social Epistemology: Inspired by the rapid changes occurring in journalism and the dissemination of information online, and by a seeming loss of trust in traditional experts, this is a basic introduction to social epistemology and the moral lessons that can be drawn from it. The readings focus more narrowly on the topic of ‘echo chambers’ and responses to these: Sunstein and Vermeule 2009 ‘Conspiracy Theories: causes and cures’ and Greenwald 2010 ‘Obama Confidant’s Spine-Chilling Proposal’.
A.I.: This topic provides a bit of a change of pace, and a break from the general trajectory of the course. It is an opportunity to discuss moral personhood, diffusion of responsibility, behaviour towards non-humans, just war, and ‘value landscapes’ (i.e. trolley problems).
Managing the Commons: This is not a peculiarly new topic, but rather one of such contemporary urgency that it was hard to leave out. The idea is to give students a basic idea of the economics behind a ‘tragedy of the commons’, and an account of what a moral solution might look like (drawing on the work of the Ostroms and others). Of course, every generation creates its own new tragedies of the commons, so this can tie back nicely to earlier topics, as well as to longstanding ecological problems that are more commonly discussed.
Two other good readings for this course are Winner 1980 ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ and O’Neill 2009 ‘Ethics for Communication?’.
I am very grateful to Dinesh Devaraj, PJ Holtum, Elese Dowden, Ben Retschlag who pointed me towards some great resources for this course.
The ArachneanMetaxion Point 