Syllabus, Philosophy 303, Theories of Ethics, Spring 2005

CRN 20105, 12:00 MWF in Natural Resources 201

Prof. J. W. Powell, Ph.D.; e-mail, jwp2@humboldt.edu; Website: www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2;

Office: 110 UANX; ph. x5753 Office hours: 10 Mondays and Wednesdays, 1-2 Wednesdays,

Thursdays 11-12, one more TBA at Wildberry’s, and by appt.

Your odds are good of catching me anytime I'm not teaching or in committee meetings.

Description: We make decisions every day with moral implications to them. Give a handout to someone on the Arcata Plaza? Buy the Roadkill Frogs CD, save the money, or send the money to Oxfam for tsunami relief? Tell your friend, or boss, or teacher, the truth? Recycle? How fanatically? Drive, bus, walk, or bike? Work hard on assignments or just get by? Take supplies from work for your own use? You could consider your own last few days and add to the list. Furthermore, we judge the things that people do. Someone you know is cheating on his partner; or, she used a roommate’s paper for an assignment; or, he does not see how his obliviousness winds up a way of using people. You could consider some people you know and add more to this list too.

             Morally loaded decisions and moral judgments are the basic subject matter of ethics. Ethical theories have offered ways to make sense of those decisions and judgments, and often the theories offer to guide us in how to decide, how to judge. Ethics is one of the main subdivisions of philosophy, and the problems in ethics are central, ancient questions: How can moral judgments and decisions be properly justified? What are the relations between facts and values? Why should we be good? Can an ethical theory tell us how to live? How would that work?

             We will examine the moral theories which have been historically most important, along with some critiques of them, taking them roughly in chronological order. We will end by considering challenges philosophers have raised, trying to reshape the goals and functions of ethics.

Place of the course in the major and in the General Education Program. Phil 303 is one of the courses meeting upper division Area C General Education requirements. It is also a required course for students in the philosophy major. Philosophy majors can double-count the course as meeting both requirements. That we have these two groups in the class may require patience from both. Some of the philosophy majors in the class may have more background, and more interest in details, than some of the students taking the course only for G.E. We will pursue a middle way; we will do careful clarification of the central issues and we will minimize racing through difficult material with no time to think it over.

Course Format: Readings are central to this course, but the main business will take place in the classroom, in mixed lecture and discussion. Our particular readings are central and basic to any educated person’s knowledge. Still, they support what happens in class. The proportion of lecture to discussion will vary. There may be several lectures in a row with only minimal discussion, though often the course will involve short lectures at the beginning of each class meeting followed by discussion, some of it in small groups. Students will sometimes need to pay close attention to stay on top of the structure of discussion. I hardly ever show videotapes, and I use the blackboard rather than overheads. I have accommodated students with various forms of disability. Exam questions and essay assignments are always made available at least a week before they are due. Students can participate in discussion via e-mail (see below), but not as a substitute for coming to class. I will write and hand out summary letters to the class at various points during the semester, which may help tie discussions together.

The Discipline of Philosophy: The double audience (students in the course for G.E. and students in the course for the philosophy major) gives another reason for articulating how I think of philosophy.

             Some of this is basic. There are a set of standard, old-chestnut problems in philosophy, and I identify philosophy with those problems. I think that list is more valuable than any definition could be. What can I know about the world based on my perceptions? How is it possible to justify moral judgments? What is X___, really? (Where X is knowledge or goodness or a human being or justice or art or freedom or . . . .) Can I ever really know the contents of another’s mind? How can words, which are dead sounds or marks, communicate living ideas? What are the criteria of a good argument?

             It’s another basic matter that philosophy requires us to rethink our thinking with a cold eye, and that we be willing to admit when we find we do not know what we thought we knew. You cannot do philosophy while you are trying to show off your learning or your cleverness, even if lots of philosophers pretend to do so. Philosophy is about humility. Marching through arguments with an agenda might be fun, but it is not philosophy. Philosophy involves willingness to change your mind, willingness to get in the ring with arguments, really in the ring, not just punching Gameboy buttons but taking the risk that some of the arguments may knock you on your ass.

             But the next is not quite so basic, though lots of philosophers endorse it too–philosophy is not just working over the arguments for the various proposed answers to these questions, but also involves examining our own thinking at the very beginning of our work, as the problem tightens its grip on us. That is, philosophy involves questioning the question just as much, maybe more, as it involves answering it. This sounds so commonsensical that it is easy to miss how corrosive it can be. I’ve become convinced that lots of philosophical questions are based on mistakes, and that the result of doing good philosophical work is that they, the problems, evaporate in our hands. This is difficult. How the hell could anything be wrong with the question, “What is art, really?”

             I don’t think it is possible to make these matters clear in a fifty word essay, any more than a fifty word essay can teach me how to play the piano. But perhaps some of these remarks may become more clear as we go.

             I’m particularly interested these days in the status of abstractions and formal processes in relation to wisdom. That won’t help prospective students, will it? Let’s see. I think many of the standard problems in philosophy owe their existence to a prejudice in favor of abstractions, a prejudice I probably still share but one challenged by traditions in which wisdom is sometimes offered up in unexplained concrete stories. The Western-Civ philosopher in me always wants to tell what the point of the story is in abstract terms, and usually I can pull this off. But insisting that the payoff line or the moral of the story be put in abstract terms may mislead us about what is important in the exchange. Still not getting warm. An example? No, I cannot in this setting develop an example. They take too long.

             For those interested in the division between so-called continental philosophy and so-called analytic philosophy, my background and approach may be hard to classify–I was nurtured in an analytic department but then something happened to me. I am interested in and pay attention to arguments but am not sure that analytic approaches can excavate to the level where philosophy can be healing.

             Let’s leave these matters for a while. You can see more of my thinking on these matters on my website–there’s a piece I wrote on what’s Wittgenstein’s accomplishment, and another on progress in philosophy, illustrated with some talk about philosophy of language.

Texts and Materials: There are no required texts for you to buy. I’m putting readings up on Blackboard, giving them out in class handouts, or putting them on reserve in the library. You might want to buy some of the texts anyway, since you are not an educated person if you do not want Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Nietzsche on your bookcase. In addition to the materials available through Blackboard, all handouts in class will be covered in discussion and on the exams. If you miss a class meeting, be sure to check with someone for handouts. Some of the handouts will even have been written during our lifetimes. The reading load is not large in number of pages, but some of the reading is difficult, so give yourself time to go slowly. The emphasis throughout is on clarification of issues and description and evaluation of arguments, and we will spend some time on crucial methods early on. Again, what happens in class is more important than the readings; don't skip class. (There are usually a couple or three or four students who forget this, to find out the truth of it at the end when it is too late.)

Grading: Quizzes (short, basic, multiple-choice, not returned to students, to ensure students do the assigned readings) are possible at any moment. I will take attendance whenever I think of it, and on those days attendance is required. The main grades, however, are grades you earn on your essay work. You can expect to write about twenty pages of essays over the semester, probably divided into four assignments. There will be three midterm exams and a final exam, each exam counting 1/4, except that poor or stellar performance on the aforementioned quizzes, optional assignments, extra research, outstanding participation in class or via e-mail (see below) can raise or lower your final grade by one third of a grade. Exams will consist for the most part of five to eight essay questions from which you choose one or two to write, due at least a week after I distribute the questions. The final may be done either as an in-class exam or as a take-home, your choice, allowing students to turn in their finals early and to devote finals week to other things. You will have opportunity to draft a question of your own for exams after the first midterm.

             There will be a handout on grading criteria before the first midterm. An abbreviation of that goes as follows: Students are graded not on the positions they give on the philosophical problems but rather on how well they articulate the arguments involved, how well they work to clarify the issues, and whether they have sympathetically articulated the strongest objections to their own views and responded to those thoughtfully, using the strategies developed in the course. If you are trying to support a position argued for or against in the readings or in class, be sure to show you understand that fact. Directions for the essay assignments provide organizational suggestions to make fulfilling these criteria easier, and the handout on grading also provides some help regarding strategy for writing philosophy. Learning the methods is a main focus in the course. Showing you’ve learned the methods is an important piece of getting a good grade. These grading criteria and the help with strategy are broadly applicable, not just to philosophy but to any situations in which you are working with issues and arguments and in which critical thinking is called for.

Discussion: Students will be required to access their HSU Blackboard web page to get materials and to post (send) a short assignment to the discussion list. After that, participation in discussion via e-mail is encouraged but not required. I may make a paper copy of e-mail exchanges available on my office door.

             I taught for several years at a university in which the courses like this one were taught to an auditorium of 180+ students. That made discussion impossible, and the teaching and learning that are helped by discussion did not happen, and I hated it. I will not require you to take part in discussion, but I will provide opportunities and I encourage you not to hide out, because sometimes having people respond to your ideas is a help. The electronic discussion is another place where this can happen. It helps if you listen as well as talk.

             E-mail discussions are not an adequate substitute for group and one-to-one discussions--they are a rather distant second choice, at least for most. On the other hand, often the choice is not between computerized discussion and classroom discussion but is rather between computerized discussion and no discussion at all. The computer discussion sometimes has some virtues which are rare in the classroom--the pace can be more thoughtful, the lines of thought preserved better in the face of wisecracks or startling examples or someone becoming offended. The arguments for you participating in the electronic discussion are strong, and the argument against my requiring it is mainly based on the commitment to being inclusive. Please participate if you can see your way clear.

Schedule: (Our pace depends on the pace of discussion. These dates will be revised as we go. Students will help choose later topics.)

Weeks (estimated). . . . . Topics and readings . . . . . .Assignments and Exams

1 and 2. Intro, methods, Plato's Euthyphro (www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/euthyphr.htm), storytelling and examples; handouts on methods. Critical thinking as describing arguments and clarifying issues. The bogeyman of definition.

3. To what extent can the attack against Euthyphro’s account of goodness be broadened?

4 and 5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Midterm I, perhaps during week four (announced a week ahead).

6 and 7. Mill, Utilitarianism.

8. Kant, Fundamental Principles of a Metaphysic of Morals. Midterm II.

9 and 10. Kant, continued.

11 and 12. Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil and from A Genealogy of Morals. Midterm III.

13 and 14. Critiques of ethics in general. Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics.” Particularism as a failed critique. The goals of ethics reconsidered. Relativism, Absolutism, and A Plague on Both Your Houses. 14 and 15. Appraisal of our work, Final Exam:

The Instructor: I’ve been teaching philosophy for about twenty-five years. My Ph.D. is from the University of Oregon in Eugene, where I taught for a dozen years. I’m particularly interested in ancient philosophy, philosophy of language, critical thinking, and philosophy of education, but I’ve lots of other interests as well. You can see some of those interests on my website. This course is one of my favorites to teach. I never get it quite settled--I’m always tuning the course, partly because I only use topics I’m still thinking about. I’ve some background (undergraduate major, three years of graduate work, a dozen or so courses taught) in literature and writing, and it shows in my teaching, for good or ill.

  On goals:

             The University and the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences recently asked faculty to review courses in the light of General Education Goals. Some of the adopted goals turn out to be shaping ideas for this course. Indeed, I often have moments where I think the philosophy department is the only department competent to address them, except for other departments who poach on my hunting grounds; here they are.

 --We will develop an understanding of how humanistic approaches are important to an overall understanding of human experience. For instance, a scientist may work away at discovery of the causes of AIDS or amotivational syndrome or schizophrenia, but it is a philosopher, working within the humanities, who works to make us aware of what counts as a cause and why we ask about causes. A fisheries biologist may work to rehabilitate spawning grounds but it is in philosophical moments that we place that effort within larger questions of significance or articulate the values and assumptions that she takes for granted in her work. A psychologist may trace interesting relations between stages of development and ethical attitudes, but we are doing philosophy when we ask about whether those relations should change our concept of morality or ethics. We will see many instances of these distinctions in this course.

 --We will understand how scholarly questions and writing in the humanities are different from scholarship in other fields, and how those other fields may connect with philosophical or other humanistic scholarship. For instance, we are going to read works on ethics by some long-dead philosophers and then point out how our interest in their arguments and issues is different from the interest of a historian.

 --We will become able to question the relationships between generalizations and examples, especially in connection with our work on general philosophical questions. This is a recurrent theme in philosophy courses. For example, in philosophical work on the question of the meaning of life, our own lives and the lives of Socrates, Sartre, William James, Zen masters, and others help us think through our answers and provide evidence. In this course, the question how we recognize whether a definition of good is better or worse than others requires us to attend to a sliding scale of abstractions, from examples of good actions to issues about actions to generalizations about goodness. We will first concentrate on putting together possible answers, but then will shift to the question of how general we are requiring each answer to be, and what assumptions we have to make to ask the question.

 --We will be working consistently through the semester to identify our own resources for providing good answers to the philosophical problems. That is, we are not going to limit our possible answers to those provided by dead white European males, but instead will stretch to imagine other alternatives. We will regard ourselves and our own imaginations as important resources in our work. In ethics, common sense is an important preventative measure against mistakes.

 --We will increase our awareness of the environment of ideas around us which shapes possibilities we might otherwise take for granted. That is, we have been raised to think in particular ruts and need to lift up our heads to look around us. We will also look in the mirror--note our own reactions to this environment of ideas. It's a recurrent theme in philosophy that we need to think of things we had not considered. For instance, in work on the question of whether goodness is a conspiracy of people with a slave mentality, we will read works by people who disagree with each other profoundly, and our reactions of agreement and disagreement, or of scorn or admiration, may help or hinder our ability to think independently about the question. What can we do so those reactions we have don't paralyze us or make us miss important insights? Trying to understand ideas from traditions which are quite different from our own can help us see new possibilities.

 There are some by-the-way parts of meeting those goals. Accordingly, we are going to also work on the following:

 --We will learn the lingo. We will learn the vocabulary of argument, and clarify those terms we use everyday which are philosophically loaded. Philosophy is one place where clarity of language is absolutely necessary, and our work to show what words do and how they mark distinctions from each other helps to clarify how crucial clear thinking, writing, and speaking are to the humanities.

 --We will be active. This does not mean students have to talk out every class, but it means passivity and memorization which might work in other disciplines don't here. Worse, passivity shows you don't get it. We will worry and take the stakes seriously and find cause for enthusiasm and feel attacked and feel as though what we have to say on these matters, matters.

 --We will raise our standards of discussion. We will pay attention to how arguments fail and how they could be made better. We will watch ourselves fail and do better. We will become enlightened about the possibilities of doing better and failing. We will become more demanding--this comes with being educated.

 --We will pay attention to how people have been unfairly robbed of their voices by others with more power. We do this in order to take arguments seriously no matter who gives them voice. We will insist that arguments work not because the arguer has the right number of limbs, the right skin color or sexual plumbing or money or powerful friends, but because they are good arguments. We will note arguments which have been discounted unfairly because they came from women or minorities or otherwise marginalized people.