Re: Normativity

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And did you just write something about the Victorian novel being boring?


Posted by: Jonathan | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 8:58 PM
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I'm not sure whether it would fit with what you're doing, but Parfit's "Five Mistakes in Moral Mathematics" is kind of fun.


Posted by: pjs | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:22 PM
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It sounds like Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis would dovetail nicely with what you're doing here.

If you really want to throw everyone off the tracks, try assigning Bonhoeffer's Ethics. He says it's okay to lie to your teacher!


Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 9:37 PM
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Hare


Posted by: y | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:01 PM
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Boring? Pffhh. What you plan would be too much for the quarter-length courses which I teach. I've largely dropped virtue ethics in most years and leave rule-consequentialism largely at the wondrous subtlety of a passing mention. That stuff might fit into a semester-length course, though. I myself like to do a chunk on well-being, equality, priority, desert, and the Slogan, because that stuff induces the better students to think about instructive structural issues about the good and helps me to figure out which students have a hard time thinking in the kind of abstraction that's characteristic of theories of normative ethics. But I'm probably idiosyncratic in doing that stuff. You should probably consider doing Ross at some point; at which point to do Ross depends on whether you want to launch into deontology with something pretty accessible or segue into pluralism after all manner of more Spartan views. I also spend a fair bit of time on constraints (and a bit on options), and do some particularism at the end. Sometimes I do Scanlon's "Contractualism and Utilitarianism". Always too much to choose from . . . Do fun, engaging stuff and don't worry too much about limiting yourself to canonical readings.


Posted by: pekka | Link to this comment | 07-19-05 11:16 PM
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Edmund Corcoran on Metahemeralism.


Posted by: ogmb | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 1:15 AM
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[redacted]


Posted by: [redacted] | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 7:11 AM
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Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you were going to take an upper-level undergraduate course in normative ethics in the fall. What would you want to read in such a course?

The question is, what should you want to read in such a course?


Posted by: alkali | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 11:51 AM
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[redacted]


Posted by: [redacted] | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 12:03 PM
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That's always the problem with those fully informed and rational clauses.


Posted by: Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 12:09 PM
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G.E. Moore, "The Subject-Matter of Ethics" is wrong in interesting ways.

Colin Strang, "What If Everyone Did That?" is just good fun.

I have a soft spot for Gauthier on contractarian ethics, the two I've read are "Morality and Advantage" and "Why Contractarianism?"

These and many more in the excellent, Cahn and Haber, 20th Century Ethical Theory.


Posted by: washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 1:11 PM
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Great topic, and not just because the post mocks me. I never taught a course like this, but like other grad students, I dreamed up a few experiments I was longing to try. Here's one. Start with some number of competing theories about what value is: Kant, Aristototle, some of the better utilitarians, and mebbe Scanlon or Rawls. With those in place, I might explore a couple of classic normative issues (politics!) and see how the various value theories play out. I tend to agree that rule-consequentialism deserves only a mere mention. But that's because I hate it passionately.


Posted by: baa | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 4:25 PM
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Interesting point from Tim Burke.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 5:13 PM
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I found this post of his enlightening as well.


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 5:15 PM
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That one's good too.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 5:16 PM
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When I ethics taught at liberal arts colleges I found that my best successes came when students had a puzzling little story to hang onto. So the course tended to evolve into a succession of such stories: the Russian Nobleman, the rationally irrational guy, the Toxin Puzzle, Hume's farmers needing to help each other with their harvests, various and sundry Newcombites, the Experience Machine, and so on. That's what the students liked to think about, so that's what I gave them. Oh how they adored the Toxin Puzzle! One term, 12 of 17 students wrote their final paper on it (where they could have written about anything). And once you've got them truly puzzled about toxin (i.e. one-person practical commitment), you can administer mouthfuls of nifty action theory along with your ethics and begin to make it actually interesting to yourself.


Posted by: Ted H. | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 5:16 PM
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I actually don't find that the Burke's lesson applies in teaching ethics. At least at liberal arts colleges, which Burke and I are discussing, with their generally bright and eager students in small classes, students tend to learn most from the work that matters most. This isn't true of epistemology, which I now mostly teach (or is it that the students are different at the State U. where I've moved?), but I found that ethics classes at liberal arts colleges worked best when I assigned Korsgaard, Parfit, Velleman, Frankfurt, and other first-rate philosophers who write punchy prose using vivid puzzle-stories. Second-rate ethics tends to be plodding and quasi-technical, whereas first-rate ethics -- the stuff the second-raters niggle over -- tends to be bold and vivid (there are exceptions, of course!). Students generally respond better to the first-rate stuff, in my experience, which is nice since it's the stuff I most want to think about myself.


Posted by: Ted H. | Link to this comment | 07-20-05 8:06 PM
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To focus debate, consider the novel Dawn by Octavia Butler.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 07-23-05 9:45 AM
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