Undergraduate

Many of the toughest ethical and political challenges confronting the world today are related to environmental issues: for example, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the unsustainable use of natural resources, pollution, and other threats to the well-being of both present and future generations.  Using both classic and contemporary works, this course will highlight some of the fundamental and unavoidable philosophical questions presented by such environmental issues.  What do the terms “nature” and “wilderness” even mean, and can “natural” environments as such have ethical and/or legal standing?  Does the environmental crisis demand radically new forms of ethical and political philosophizing and practice?  Must an environmental ethic reject anthropocentrism?  If so, what are the most plausible non-anthropocentric alternatives?  What counts as the proper ethical treatment of non-human animals, living organisms, or ecosystems?  What fundamental ethical and political perspectives inform such approaches as the “Land Ethic,” ecofeminism, and deep ecology?  Is there a plausible account of justice for future generations?  Are we now in the Anthropocene?  Is “adaptation” the best strategy at this historical juncture?  How can the wild, the rural, and the urban all contribute to a better future for Planet Earth? (A)

Aristotle taught that happiness, or eudaimonia, is the end of human life, in the sense that it is what we should strive for. But, in another sense, death is the end of life. This course will explore how these two “ends” – happiness and death – are related to each other. But it will do so in the context of a wider set of concerns. For, it is not only our individual lives that come to an end: ways of life, cultural traditions, civilizations and epochs of human history end. We now live with the fear that human life on earth might end. How are we to think about, and live well in relation to, ends such as these? Readings from Aristotle, Marx, Engels, Freud, Heidegger, and Arendt.

Perhaps it is better to give than to receive, but exactly how much giving ought one to engage in and to whom or what?  Recent ethical and philosophical developments such as the effective altruism movement suggest that relatively affluent individuals are ethically bound to donate a very large percentage of their wealth to worthy causes—for example, saving as many lives as they possibly can, wherever in the world those lives may be.  And charitable giving or philanthropy is not only a matter of individual giving, but also of giving by foundations, corporations, non-profits, non-governmental and various governmental agencies, and other organizational entities that play a very significant role in the modern world. How, for example, does an institution like the University of Chicago engage in and justify its philanthropic activities? Can one generalize about the various rationales for philanthropy, whether individual or institutional? Why do individuals or organizations engage in philanthropy, and do they do so well or badly, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no coherent reasons?

This course will afford a broad, critical philosophical and historical overview of philanthropy, examining its various contexts and justifications, and contrasting charitable giving with other ethical demands, particularly the demands of justice. How do charity and justice relate to each other?  Would charity even be needed in a fully just world?  And does philanthropy in its current forms aid or hinder the pursuit of social justice, in both local and global contexts?  Readings will include such works as Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save and David Callahan’s The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, and there will be a number of special guest speakers. The course will be developed in active conversation with the work of the UChicago Civic Knowledge Project and Office of Civic Engagement, and students will be presented with some practical opportunities to engage reflectively in deciding whether, why and how to donate a certain limited amount of (course provided) funding.

What sort of knowledge do we have when know what we ought to do—where ‘what we ought to do’ is the ethical or moral thing to do? In this course we shall look at different contemporary attempts to answer this question, as well as some of their historical influences. This will involve reading some philosophers who doubt that there is any such thing as ethical knowledge, some who think ethical knowledge is akin to less controversial examples of knowledge, and some who take it to constitute a special form of knowledge. Along the way, we shall aim to get in view both the appeal and the difficulty of the ancient idea that morality can be understood in terms of knowledge. Readings will include: J.L Mackie, John McDowell, Christine Korsgaard, Peter Railton, Peter Geach and others. (A)

In this course we shall investigate the kind of rationality that is distinctive of human agency: practical rationality. We shall consider what (if anything) sets practical reasoning apart from theoretical reasoning as a special form of rationality, as well as the relation between the kind of rationality distinctive of agents and the moral character of action. Some of the questions we shall consider are:  What makes an action rational or irrational? Is it irrational to act immorally? If so, what kind of failure of rationality does that involve? Is instrumental reasoning exhaustive of practical reasoning? Is instrumental reasoning itself an ‘amoral’ activity?  We shall read selections from: Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Christine Korsgaard, Kieran Setiya, Warren Quinn, David Enoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and others. (A)