Philosophy 1140-03 - Ethics Office
Hours: M, W, F 10:20-11:20
Spring Semester 2007 Office: LC143S; Phone: 2604
Professor
Tom Atchison Email:
tatchison@gw.hamline.edu
Course Materials
The following books are (or will be) available at the
bookstore: Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism;
Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals; Wilcox and Wilcox, Applied
Ethics in American Society. Other
course readings will be photocopied or made available online. Please bring the text to be discussed to
class with you every time.
Class website
I maintain a simple
website where I post course handouts and information. The URL is www.woldww.net/classes/. There are notes and study questions
posted there to help make sense of some of the more difficult readings. I will also post links to some assigned
reading that is available online.
Email
Email is
the best way to get in touch with me (better than leaving a message on my
voice-mail). I will also use the
University list-serves to send messages to the class from time to time with
schedule changes, reading notes, etc.
Please check your Hamline email regularly.
In this course you will encounter several
different kinds of ethical questions:
First, some questions about
ethics: Is there such a thing as truth
in ethics? Or is it all just 'a matter
of opinion'? Can ethical questions be
answered through rational inquiry? Or
must they be approached in some other way (through religious faith or feeling
or intuition)? Is it important to have
ethical principles and to stick to them no matter what? How can we know if an ethical principle is
correct? (Is there really any such thing
as a correct ethical principle, or is it just a matter of deciding which
principles I am 'comfortable' with?) Can
rational inquiry in ethics lead to the development of an ethical theory
that explains or justifies our ethical judgments, perhaps by showing us how
they can be derived from some more basic ethical principle? (We will study several attempts to develop
such a theory.) Are the ethical theories
developed in the 'Western' philosophical tradition really as universal and
objective as they pretend to be, or do they express the particular interests
and limited points of view of the people who constructed them? (We will approach this question primarily by
studying a feminist perspective according to which traditional ethical theories
and discussions express a distinctively male perspective.)
Second, we'll examine what we might
call ethical issues: Do we have a duty to help those who are less
fortunate than ourselves and, if so, to what extent? Is it immoral for two people of the same
gender to have sex with one another?
When, if ever, is it morally acceptable to have an abortion or to end an
ill or injured person's life? And so on.
Most of us have opinions about questions like these and most of us have
had at least some opportunity to think about them and discuss them. Here, we will try to see if the 'professional
thinkers' have anything to offer us that can help to settle these contentious
issues, and we will explore how they are approached from a variety of moral
perspectives. In this process, we'll try
to sharpen the skills we need to think carefully about these issues for ourselves.
I
cannot promise we will answer any of these questions to your satisfaction. They are, for the most part, very difficult
questions. What we can hope to do is to
learn something about how various historical and contemporary thinkers have
answered them, and to become somewhat more careful and critical in our own
efforts to answer them.
Conduct of the Course
Class time will be
devoted largely to discussion, sometimes in small groups, mostly all
together. I will occasionally lecture,
more often I will answer questions as they come up in discussion, and even more
often I will try to help you figure out how to answer your questions
yourself. Often I will end the class
with some remarks intended to orient you to the next day’s reading.
Much of
our discussion will focus on understanding and evaluating the texts. This will work well only if you have done the
assigned reading carefully -- often twice or three times -- and given it some
thought. In philosophy we are interested
not in the information that can be extracted from a text, nor simply in the
conclusions or opinions that an author expresses; we are primarily interested
in understanding and assessing the reasoning that an author uses to try
to establish or support those conclusions.
This requires a very careful sort of reading.
The point
of struggling with these difficult texts is not only to understand what some
great minds have produced. A guided tour
through the
Assignments and Grading
I expect you to
find time (an hour or two) to do the reading for each class and to come
prepared to discuss it. Come to class
ready to say what you found interesting, what you found confusing, silly, or
just plain wrong, what seemed to you to be the most important claims made, and
what arguments or justifications were offered for those claims.
20 % of your grade will be earned by submitting brief (1/4-1/2 of a double-spaced, typed page, perhaps just a few sentences) responses to the readings for each class. These must be turned in at the beginning of the class period to be counted. They can contain questions, objections, observations and/or reactions to the reading for that class. Each one should contain a brief statement of what you take to be the main point of the reading assigned for that day. I will not grade these, but I will reject any that do not seem to be based on a reasonably conscientious reading of the assignment for that day. You can miss a few of these and still earn an ‘A’ for this part of the course work, but missing more than a few will be penalized on the following schedule: 85% completed = A; 70% = B; 55% = C; 40% = D; less than 40% = F. I will also notice and reward particularly perceptive or thoughtful response papers.
Class discussion
10% of your grade will
be determined by my evaluation of the quality of your participation in
class discussions. Just showing up and
paying attention earns a C for this component; occasionally making helpful
contributions earns a B; regularly making helpful contributions earns an
A. Helpful contributions include: asking
pertinent questions, answering questions asked by the instructor or by other
students, expressing your views about the texts or topics we are discussing,
responding (relevantly and respectfully) to the views expressed by others.
Essays
You will be asked to write two short (3-5 page) essays
during the semester. Each paper will
count for 17.5% of your grade. Please
keep copies of all the work you hand in.
We will have two one-hour, in-class exams -- one at
mid-semester, one during the scheduled final exam period. Each exam will count for 17.5% of your
grade. Exam questions will be selected
(by me) from a list I will hand out in advance.
All work submitted for this course must be your own. Plagiarism is the academic ‘sin’ of presenting someone else’s work as your own. It is plagiarism if you copy something verbatim (word for word) from a published source, from the Internet, or from another student. It is still plagiarism if you rearrange, paraphrase, condense, or summarize someone else’s work without making clear to your reader what is your contribution and what is taken from your source. If the exact wording comes from your source, then use quotation marks. If the idea comes from someone else, give him or her credit for it. The way to do this is to cite your sources. There is a clear and detailed explanation of various forms of plagiarism and of proper citation practices at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/02-1/plagiarism.html. I will give a grade of ‘F’ to any student who submits plagiarized work for this course.
Ethics – Spring 2007 -- Schedule of assignments
Date to be discussed |
|
Wednesday, Jan. 31 |
Introductory session |
Friday, Feb. 2 |
Rachels on euthanasia, Applied
Ethics, pp.166-171 |
Monday, Feb. 5 |
Mill, Utilitarianism,
to p.12 |
Wednesday. Feb. 7 |
Mill, Utilitarianism,
to p.26 (end of Chapter 2) |
Friday, Feb. 19 |
Mill, Utilitarianism,
to p.41 (Chapters 3 and 4) |
Monday, Feb. 12 |
Kant Grounding…,
Section 1 |
Wednesday, Feb. 14 |
Kant Grounding…,
Section 2, through page 33 |
Friday, Feb. 16 |
Kant Grounding…,
Section 2, pp. 33-48 |
Monday, Feb. 19 |
Mill, Utilitarianism,
Chapter 5 |
Wednesday, Feb. 21 |
Intro to chapter on capital
punishment in Applied Ethics, pp.238-247 and article by Bedau
pp.248-259 |
Friday, Feb. 23 |
Articles by van den Haag
(pp.260-265) and Primoratz (pp.284-294) in Applied Ethics |
Monday, Feb. 26 |
|
Wednesday, Feb. 28 |
Singer in Applied Ethics,
pp.358-368 |
Friday, March 2 |
Hardin in Applied Ethics,
pp.369-380 |
Monday, March 5 |
Van Wyk in Applied Ethics, pp.381-390 |
Wednesday, March 7 |
Hospers, in Applied Ethics,
pp. 311-322 |
Friday, March 9 |
Govier, in Applied Ethics,
pp. 328-341; |
Monday March 12 |
Rawls in Applied Ethics,
pp. 38-44 (skip the last section of this selection) plus more Rawls in a
handout |
Wednesday, March 14 |
Review 1st paper due |
Friday, March 16 |
Mid-term Exam |
March 17-25 |
Spring Break |
Monday, March 26 |
Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, Book I |
Wednesday, March 28 |
Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, Book II |
Friday, March 30 |
Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, Book III and Book IV (as much as you can stand) |
Monday, April 2 |
Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, Book VI |
Wednesday, April 4 |
Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, Book X |
Friday, April 6 |
No class |
Monday, April 9 |
Aristotle, Nichomachean
Ethics, Books VIII and IX |
Wednesday, April 11 |
Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices in Applied Ethics pp. 50-58 |
Friday, April 13 |
Alan Soble, Philosophy of
Sexuality, sections 6 ("Sexual Perversion") through 13 (Natural Law
vs. Liberal Ethics) online; Levin in Applied Ethics, pp.675-680 |
Monday, April 16 |
Kaplan in Applied Ethics, pp.681-690 |
Wednesday,
April 18 |
Sherwin in Applied Ethics,
pp.59-69 |
Friday,
April 20 |
|
Monday,
April 23 |
Marquis in Applied Ethics,
pp.99-110 |
Wednesday,
April 25 |
Mackenzie in Applied Ethics,
pp.120-133 |
Friday,
April 27 |
Wolf-Devine in Applied
Ethics, pp.145-155 |
Monday,
April 30 |
Introduction to Chapter 8
pp.539-540 and Mill in Applied Ethics, pp.550-558 |
Wednesday,
May 2 |
Introduction to Chapter 8
pp.541-546 and |
Friday,
May 4 |
Gastil, in Applied Ethics,
pp. 569-579 |
Monday,
May 7 |
Langton, in Applied Ethics,
pp.602-625 |
Wednesday,
May 9 |
|
Friday,
May 11 |
Review;
2nd paper due |
Monday, May 14, 10:00 AM |
Final Exam (in our regular classroom) |