Fall Quarter

Rights and obligations in a social world

In everyday life many of our encounters and relationships result in rights and obligations. For instance, if I promise to phone you tomorrow, you now have a right to my calling you then, and I have an obligation to do so. But what are rights and obligations, and how exactly do we come by them? Do we have some rights irrespective of our specific encounters and relationships with others? This course will focus on such questions, drawing on the work of moral, legal, and social theorists.

Analysis of epistemological issues concerning medical research and health care. Topics may include medical evidence, transmission of medical knowledge, medical expertise, the epistemology of medical disagreement, classification of illnesses, well-being, philosophy of pain, and medical decision making.

This course will be devoted to a close reading of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. There Nietzsche asks a startling question: what is the value of morality? That is, what is the value of those fundamental moral values by reference to which we judge persons and their actions? Nietzsche at least begins to answer this question by offering a historical account of the emergence of moral values out of older, nonmoral values. We'll try to make sense of this account and the many philosophical issues it raises. Topics we'll cover include: the pre-moral ideas of goodness and virtue; the slave revolt in morality and the transformation of the pre-moral notion of goodness into the moral notion of goodness, and the moral notion of evil; guilt and its role in morality; the ascetic ideal and its relation to morality; power, its value, and its relation to the standard by which Nietzsche thinks we must assess the value of morality. This class will be a discussion based seminar with a substantial participation requirement.

Metaphysics (or ontology) is traditionally defined as the study of what there is, of reality, of the world and basic forms of existence in the world. We shall study ontological categories of mind, self, body, and social reality — looking to the place of metaphysics in philosophy at large. A fundamental issue, we find, is how reality is related to how things are given in our experience of various aspects of reality.

The law is implicated in almost every part of our life. But the practice of law still has its own distinct set of norms and values, which might be questioned. For example: why defend guilty people? Why should a lawyer discredit an honest witness? Why make an injurer pay for all the harm he inflicted if it was an accident? Why release a guilty defendant because of how the evidence was gathered? What does “presumed innocent” and “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean, and what’s the difference between legal proof and ordinary proof? The course explores these and related questions, drawing on cases, news items and the work of experts.           (III)

What should I do?  Why should I do what I do?  These questions are at the heart of philosophical ethics, as well as at the heart of our lives. The aim of this course is twofold: we will consider philosophical theories that are supposed to answer these questions; we will then consider a variety of disputed moral issues in order to test these theories in practice.                                                                  (IV)