Spring

Are some acts wrong "whatever the consequences"? Do consequences matter when acting for the sake of duty, or virtue, or what is right? How do "consequentialist" ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, address such issues? This course will address these questions by critically examining some of the most provocative defenses of consequentialism in the history of philosophy, from the work of the classical utilitarians Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick to that of Peter Singer, one of the world's most influential living philosophers and the founder of the animal liberation and effective altruism movements. Does consequentialism lend itself to the Panoptical nightmares of the surveillance state, or can it be a force for a genuinely emancipatory ethics and politics? (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.

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)