Syllabus                                                          Professor Tom Atchison 

PHIL 355                                                       Office:  320 St. John’s Hall (St. Paul Campus)

Moral Theory                                                Email: Thomas.Atchison@metrostate.edu

Fall Semester 2013                                        Office hours: M 2:30-5:30, T 11-3, W 5-7
                                                                        Phone: 651-793-1493

                                                                        (Email is the best way to get a quick response.)

Course Objectives

• To provide students with an opportunity to study several current moral theories (theories about what morality is or what moral judgments are) in some depth.

• To provide students with an opportunity to hone, refine and deepen their philosophical skills

• To provide students with an opportunity to reflect on what it means to lead a moral life or be a moral person.

• To consider what philosophical reflection can possibly contribute to our efforts to lead moral lives or to be good people, including some challenges to the assumption that a general theory is what we want from moral philosophy.

Course Description from the Catalogue

            When we say something is morally right or wrong, are we simply expressing our personal feelings or are we saying something more? Who gets to decide (and how do they decide) what makes something morally right or wrong? Do moral issues have answers about which we can be certain? Does morality have well-regarded theories like the physical sciences do--theories which help ethicists and others to decide what is right or wrong? These and other questions will be addressed in this decidedly theory-focused course in moral philosophy.

Course Materials

Ruling Passions by Simon Blackburn

Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity by Christine Korsgaard

One more book???  Perhaps Frankfurt: The Reasons of Love

                                    Or Dorrit: Lack of Character

                                    Or Dworkin: Justice for Hedgehogs 

      (To accommodate any of these we would have to skip some of Blackburn or Korsgaard or go faster.)

Other readings will be photocopied and handed out in class or will be made available on my website. 

http://www.woldww.net/classes/

Please bring the assigned reading to class with you each week.

Please make sure your Metro State email account is working and check regularly for class related emails -- this course is especially likely to be revised on the fly. 

Conduct of the Course

            Class time will be devoted almost entirely to discussion.  Students will be expected to take a good deal of initiative for determining the direction and focus of that discussion and, to some extent, of the course as a whole. 

            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 careful 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 reading these texts is not only to understand what some great minds have produced.  A guided tour through the Museum of Great Ideas is a very good thing, but not the best thing that philosophy has to offer.  Better is the opportunity to learn to think for yourself.  The readings provide models of careful and/or creative thinking, challenges to our prejudices and assumptions, and starting points for our own reflections.  But the only way to learn to philosophize is to enter the conversation yourself.  In this way a course in philosophy is more like a course in drawing or sculpture -- a studio art course -- than like a course in art history or art appreciation.  You can’t learn to draw by just watching other people draw, and you can’t learn to do philosophy by just listening and reading.  You have to express your views and expose them to other people’s critical reactions.   

Assignments and Grading

Reading assignments

              I expect you to find time (six or seven hours) 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, questionable, 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.  Expect that you will need to read the assignments more than once to understand them adequately, and plan your time accordingly.  Depending on how much background you have in moral philosophy, you may need to take considerable time to look up various terms, concepts, writers, and schools of thought, just to understand what our authors are saying.

            30 % of your grade will be earned by submitting brief (2-3 pages, typed, double-spaced) responses to the readings for each class.  These must be turned in at the beginning of the class period or emailed to me before class to get full credit.  Late response papers will earn half credit if and only if they are turned in before the following class period.  Response papers turned in more than one week late will earn no credit (except perhaps in heaven).  If you must miss a class, send in your response paper by e-mail before the start of that class.

            Each week’s response paper should contain a concise summary of the main points made by the author and a critical discussion of one argument that you found in the text.  Your critical discussion should include a concise statement of the argument (as you understand it) and an assessment of its success.  (Does the author prove his or her point?  Can you identify weaknesses in the argument?)  Your grade for this assignment will be based on your 10 best response papers.

Class discussion

            20% 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.

Term Paper

             A term paper will be due at the end of the semester.  Topic proposals and a draft will be due earlier. This paper should be 10-15 pages (approximately) and will count for 50% of your grade.  It will be your opportunity to develop in some depth your own ideas about some topic considered in the class.  For philosophy majors, it will be a transitional step between the shorter papers required in most of our classes and your capstone project.  Detailed instructions will be handed out later.

Note:  I try hard to base my evaluation of your work on your understanding of the reading, the quality of your reasoning and questioning, and the clarity and effectiveness of your expression of your thoughts, not on whether I agree with your philosophical theories, ideas, or opinions.

Please keep copies of all the work you hand in.

Time commitment outside of class

            In accordance with Metropolitan State University guidelines, I've designed this course with the expectation that students will do 2-3 hours of course-related work outside of class for every hour spent in class.  In other words, you should expect to spend 7-10 hours a week outside of class working on this course. 

Needed reading and writing skills

            Although there are no prerequisites for this course, it is an upper-division course.  This means I assume you have the following reading and writing skills, and assignments are made with this expectation in mind:

• Ability to read and summarize the main points of analytical, abstract material such as Supreme Court decisions and academic journal articles;
• Ability to include appropriate citations of quoted and paraphrased sources in academic writing;
• Ability to construct short, analytical essays including stating and supporting a thesis, presenting and addressing objections to your thesis, and drawing conclusion
• Ability to edit written work well enough to eliminate most errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling.
• Sufficient background in philosophy (or the willingness to acquire this background as we go along) to understand texts that utilize some of the standard vocabulary and strategies of the discipline.

Course Policies

Disability Services

Metropolitan State University offers reasonable accommodations to qualified students with documented disabilities. If you have a disability that may require accommodations it is essential that you be registered with the Disability Services Office.  You may contact the Disability Services Office, at Founders Hall, Room 221, St. Paul Campus or (651) 793-1549, or email Disability.Services@metrostate.edu  For additional information on Disability Services, please visit:  http://www.metrostate.edu/msweb/pathway/academic_success/disability/index.html  

Attendance

            I do not require attendance per se, but part of your grade is determined by class discussion.  I strongly advise regular attendance (and prompt completion of response papers) because the material in this course is relatively difficult and confusing, and few students will be able to do well on their term papers without the explanations and practice provided in class.

Late work

Response papers must be turned in at (or before) the beginning of class to receive full credit.  Late response papers will receive half credit. In fairness to students who turn their term papers in on time, I will subtract one grade (e.g., B+ to B) for each day that a term paper is late.

Incompletes

            I will give incomplete grades only to students who have satisfactorily completed most of the course work and who are unable to finish on time because of circumstances beyond their control.

Plagiarism

            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.   

Drop date, Tuition Refunds, and Academic Standing

            Withdrawing from courses after the drop deadline (Sunday, Sept. 1) will result in a ‘W’ on your record and may bring your completion rate below the ratio required to remain in  good academic standing (66.66%).  It will also eliminate any possibility of a refund of the tuition you have paid and this may have an impact on your financial aid.  My advice is to determine quickly whether or not this is the right course for you and to drop before that deadline (just a few days away), if it is not.  This is an academically demanding class with a relatively heavy schedule of reading and writing assignments.  In addition most of the readings are quite difficult.  If your reading and writing skills are not up to this challenge, or if you do not have 7-10 hours per week to devote to completing these assignments, I urge you to drop this class before Sept. 1, so you can get your money back and avoid jeopardizing your financial aid.

PHIL 355 – Moral Theory – Fall 2013 -- Tentative Schedule of Assignments

One reason for the tentativeness of this schedule is that I need to get a sense of how fast we can go.  It may be possible to cover more ground each week and include more topics/texts.  We’ll see.  Another is that we may want to skip some of these chapters in order to make room for a third book.