phil 468: Topics in ethics
The Generic Catalog Description
The various sections of this course discuss a wide variety of ethical issues.
PHIL 468: Topics in Ethics: Globalization Ethics (course is linked with Dr. Wren's PHIL 321: Ethics and Society: Globalization Ethics)
David Schweickart
In this course we will explore economic and cultural issues of globalization, with particular attention to their normative dimensions. The economic issues include the role of global financial institutions such as the World Bank, neoliberal views on market forces, the right to work, and so on. The cultural issues will involve nationalism, colonialism, cultural identity, group rights, and related topics such as global ecology.
We will draw on a variety of sources, including videos as well as books and articles. We will begin the course with two influential (short) classic texts: Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto. Barely half a century separates these two works, and yet they are profoundly different even though both are provocative in light of contemporary reality. We will then look at John Rawls's important attempt to extend his monumental theory of justice to the relationships among nations, The Law of Peoples, Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, and Seyla Benhabib’s application of recent social and political theory in The Claims of Culture.
Other sources will take us in various different directions, sometimes well beyond the terrain of official philosophy. For example, we will read and discuss selections from the economist (and Nobel laureate) Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents, Denis Heyck's anthropological study, Surviving Globalization in Three Latin American Communities and the journalist Thomas Friedman's The Lexis and the Olive Tree, as well as essays by Peter Singer, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Pogge, and Jurgen Habermas. The readings will be supplemented with several videos about some of the disturbing by-products of globalization.
PHIL 468: God and Morality
Thomas Carson
This class will focus on two of the central questions of philosophy. The first question is: “what difference does it make for morality if God exists or does not exist?” People hold very divergent views on this topic. Some think that God has everything to do with morality and hold that God’s will or Gods’ commands are the only possible basis for an objective morality. Others think that God is irrelevant to morality. Starting with Plato, the dominant view in Western philosophy is that basic moral standards are independent of God. We will begin by examining the extremely influential arguments of Plato’s Ethyphro and some of the standard objections to the divine command theory of morality. We will then read and discuss two recent important books that defend moral theories based on God and God’s nature/will, Robert Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods (1999) and Linda Zagzebski’s Divine Motivation Theory (2004), as well as selections from Robert and Marilyn Adams's The Problem of Evil (1990). Supplemental texts include William Wainright's Religion and Morality (2005), Erik Wielenberg's Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (2005), and my own Value and the Good Life (2000).
The second question concerns the problem of evil: “Is the existence of so much suffering and evil in the world consistent with the existence of a loving, morally good, and omnipotent God?” We will read many of the classic treatments of this topic. Among the topics to be discussed are: “the free will defense” and other theories about the nature of the goods for the sake of which God permits evil/suffering, the problem of horrendous/gratuitous evils, and “the evidential problem of evil” (does the existence of so much evil and suffering in the world make it less likely that God exists?)
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