Global Arc

This seminar aims to introduce students to a range of philosophical debates in clinical and population-level bioethics. Among the topics in clinical bioethics that we may discuss are physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia; abortion; and the ethics of genetic enhancement. In population-level bioethics, questions we may discuss include the definition and measurement of health; cost-effectiveness and disability-discrimination; the significance of health inequalities; personal and social responsibility for health; treatment vs prevention in the fight against HIV/AIDS; and standards of care in clinical trials in the US and abroad.

The century that concluded with declarations of rights on both sides of the Atlantic witnessed a transformation in how people talked about rights. Previously a mostly philosophical discourse, rights talk entered the broader world of letters. But in some parts of the world (France in particular), this transformation also brought back Classical notions of natural right. This course explores how the modern language of rights emerged during the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods, and also places this "Age of Rights" in a longer history stretching from Antiquity to the twentieth century.

Modern political thought owes more to ancient Hebraic sources, including the Bible and Talmud, than has been previously acknowledged. Recent studies tell the story of political Hebraism, the early modern attempt to glean moral, legal, and political meaning from Hebraic texts. This is one of the most exciting chapters in the history of political thought being written today. This course will discuss Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and other major theorists of modern natural law and politics. We will consider how the ancient texts inspired new ideas of the rule of law, republic, and social justice.

The course explores the various forms of interaction between state power to control information flows and film production and distribution in light of normative concerns about free speech. Using concrete cinematic examples, we aim to determine normatively relevant criteria to distinguish between creative, critical, and satirical expressions of art on the one hand, and propagandistic incitement to hatred and violence as well as pornographic incitement for sexual domination and violence, on the other.

The course aims to show the various regulatory methods used by constitutional democracies worldwide, present the relevant case law, and help students understand why emergency measures could be dangerous in constitutional democracies. It is one of the main tasks of this course to draw attention to the link between autocratic transitions and exceptional measures to help better understand the importance of preserving the values of the rule of law and to discuss the relevant examples from the origins of the ancient Roman dictatorship to the recent developments related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drug addicts are commonly taken to be archetypal examples of people who have lost control over their actions. This course takes the example of addiction as a framework for understanding the ongoing debate between philosophers and psychologists about the meaning of self-control, the limitations of responsibility, and the application of theory to medical and social policy. The readings cover philosophical theory as well as some material from psychology and biology. One three-hour seminar.

Democracy gives people control over their government on a collaborative and inclusive basis, via operational and selectional constraints, thereby reducing the government's dominating power. This set of seminars will focus on why the formula requires control, not participation, and why it gives control to people severally, not to the people as a body; it will explore the operational constraints, such as the rule of law, and the selectional constraints, such as electoral process, on which it seeks to build control; and it will investigate the point of democratic control.

The seminar will look at stories in the law and about the law: court cases that turn on competing versions of a story, and how narrative "conviction" comes about, as well as fictional and non-fiction accounts of mystery, crime, investigation, and detection in literature and film. The course will introduce students to some issues in criminal law and procedure as well as to the analysis of narrative.

As much critical analysis of as many major perspectives of life and death issues in bioethics as can be squeezed into one semester. Issues to be discussed: abortion, duties to handicapped newborns, the scope of the right to refuse care, advance directives, proxy consent, respect for adolescents' life and death decisions, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, persistent vegetative state, and the definition of death. Three lectures.

This course uncovers the roots of racial injustice in Hollywood; the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation that led directly to the rebirth of the KKK and increased violence against Afro-Americans; and William Monroe Trotter's fight against the propaganda film. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.