Global Arc

The course will challenge students to examine their life from an ethical perspective. Should altruism guide our life? What is effective altruism? Should we share our wealth with people who will otherwise die from poverty-related causes? How should we live and act in an era in which human activity is changing the planet's climate? What ethical considerations are raised by eating meat and other animal products? We will also consider the Supreme Court's decision on abortion. Students will be encouraged to question their ethical beliefs and explore how reason and argument can play a role in everyday ethical decision-making.

This course will discuss policy issues relating to the environment, using several case studies to provide a deeper understanding of the science and values involved.

This course will examine issues at the intersection of ethics, policy, and public health, paying particular attention to the centuries-long tension between individual rights and the common good. Ethical arguments are increasingly visible in public health activities in the United States and worldwide, demonstrating the continued relevance of long-standing debates over the proper role of government in promoting the health of individuals and communities. The course will explore ethical, historical, and policy aspects of public health activities, and it will consider the relationship between public health ethics and bioethics.

This course will examine issues at the intersection of emotional attachment, ethics and agency theory. In particular, we will consider whether and how disordered attachment orientations might bear on questions concerning the moral agency and ethical treatment of members of certain clinical populations, including psychopaths and those who suffer from (certain forms of) addiction. In exploring these issues, we will engage with recent literature on moral responsibility, autonomous agency, and bioethical approaches to understanding the nature and treatment of the aforementioned pathologies.

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.

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.