Social/Political Philosophy

You and I might identify as all sorts of things: as an American, a woman, a teacher, a student, a hip hop enthusiast, a vegetarian, a knitter, a computer nerd, a chef, a caucasian, a runner, a news junkie, a bleeding heart liberal, a member of the tea party, a football fan, and so on. Call everything on that list a practical identity. Some practical identities are optional—we can choose or whether or not to adopt them—while others, such as gender, are such that the law requires us to adopt them. But in each of these cases, there is a question as to whether the relevant practical identity has a prescriptive or a descriptive flavor. When I tell you I’m a vegetarian, am I describing the way I am, or laying down a plan for how I’d like to be? Are vegetarians a special kind of person all of whom share a special, deep, common core, or are they just the set of people who happen to follow the convention of not eating meat? Does the way we talk about vegetarianism affect what it means to be a vegetarian—what vegetarians are or could be? This quarter, we will approach these questions through the specific case of gender identity. You might think it’s straightforward to say what it means to be a man: you’re a man just in case you have a Y chromosome, and a woman just in case you have two X chromosomes. But what about an intersex baby who is arbitrarily assigned a gender at birth? Or someone with Klinefelter syndrome, who according to the above definition would be both a man and a woman? What about someone who was born biologically female, underwent sex reassignment surgery as an adult, and now identifies as a man? What about someone who prefers not to adopt any gender identity? There is often a temptation to dismiss these examples as aberrant borderline cases. But the past few decades have seen an explosion of new gender categories, many of which may very well take center stage in our culture sooner than we think. If we decide to write them off, we need to tell some story about how our gender concepts license us to do so. If not, then we are faced with the interesting challenge of explaining what gender now is, in light of these developments.

In this class we will investigate what it is for a society to be just. In what sense are the members of a just society equal? What freedoms does a just society protect? Must a just society be a democracy? What economic arrangements are compatible with justice? In the second portion of the class we will consider one pressing injustice in our society in light of our previous philosophical conclusions. Possible candidates include, but are not limited to, racial inequality, economic inequality, and gender hierarchy. Here our goal will be to combine our philosophical theories with empirical evidence in order to identify, diagnose, and effectively respond to actual injustice. (A)

The British Utilitarians were social radicals who questioned conventional morality as a basis for both personal and public choice and proposed an alternative that they believed to be both more scientific and more morally adequate.  In part because of the widespread acceptance of pieces of their views in economics and political science, the original subtlety and radical force of the views is often neglected.  This seminar, focusing on John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, aims to examine sympathetically what classical Utilitarianism may still offer to philosophical ethics, and to see how the strongest criticisms of Utilitarianism measure up to the texts of its founders.  Although it is hardly possible to study Utilitarianism as an ethical theory without attending to its political role, we shall focus for the most part on ethics, and on two works above all: Mill’s Utilitarianism and Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, combining these with Mill’s The Subjection of Women, his Autobiography, and several key essays.  Along the way we shall be investigating the views of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick about animal suffering, women’s equality, and sexual orientation.  Among the critics of Utilitarianism, we shall consider writings of Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Jon Elster, Elizabeth Anderson, and John Harsanyi. 

This seminar will provide graduate students with an advanced introduction to the study of human rights, covering key debates in history, law, philosophy, political science, international relations, social science, and critical theory. As a graduate seminar, this will be a small class (capped at 20 students), and a strong emphasis will be placed on in-class discussion and debate. The course will examine cutting-edge research on topics including: the origins of human rights (Section I); the concept of human dignity (Section II); the nature and grounds of human rights (Section III); the relationship between human rights morality and law (Section IV); the legality and morality of humanitarian intervention (Section V); the feasibility and claimability of human rights (Section VI); contemporary criticisms of human rights (Section VII); human rights and the accommodation of diversity (Section VIII); and the future of human rights (Section IX).

This course centers on a close reading of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with some attention to his writings on the history of ancient conceptualizations of sex. How should a history of sexuality take into account scientific theories, social relations of power, and different experiences of the self? We discuss the contrasting descriptions and conceptions of sexual behavior before and after the emergence of a science of sexuality. Other writers influenced by and critical of Foucault are also discussed.

Human rights are claims of justice that hold merely in virtue of our shared humanity. In this course we will explore philosophical theories of this elementary and crucial form of justice. Among topics to be considered are the role that dignity and humanity play in grounding such rights, their relation to political and economic institutions, and the distinction between duties of justice and claims of charity or humanitarian aid. Finally we will consider the application of such theories to concrete, problematic and pressing problems, such as global poverty, torture and genocide. (A) (I)

This course will investigate the theory of human history developed by Marx and Engels - Historical Materialism, as it came to be known. Though we will primarily focus on texts by Marx and Engels, we will begin by considering some of Hegel’s writing on history, and we will end by looking at different attempts to explain, apply, and develop the theory within the Marxian tradition. (A) (IV)

This course will critically survey the various ways in which philosophy curricula are developed and used in different educational contexts and for different age groups. Considerable attention will be devoted to the growing movement in the U.S. for public educational programs in precollegiate philosophy.

The topic for Winter 2014 will be "Ideology." What makes moral, political, economic, or legal ideas "ideological," in the pejorative sense associated with the Marxian tradition? How do facts about the genesis of an ideology bear on its epistemic warrant? What is the relationship between ideology and "false consciousness"? How can an individual be mistaken about his interests? What concept of interests is needed for the theory of ideology and false consciousness? We will use some aspects of contemporary economics as a case study for the theory of ideology. Readings from some or all of Hegel, Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, J. Elster, R. Geuss, M. Rosen, G. Becker.

This course will study John Rawls’s two great works of political philosophy, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, trying to understand their argument as well as possible. We will also read other related writings of Rawls and some of the best critical literature.  Assessment will take the form of an eight-hour take-home final exam, except for those who gain permission to choose the paper option, who will write a 20-25 page paper. (I)