Syllabus

Environmental ethics forces us to reconsider the scope of our values, the limits of moral status, and our responsibility for global structural problems. Given the breadth of environmental ethics, no single course can investigate more than a subset of the discipline. In this class we will begin with a brief primer on philosophical and environmental ethics before orienting ourselves around three broad questions. Our focus in section 1a will be on the understanding and applying the distinction between moral principles and intuitions—a distinction that is particularly important when dealing with environmental ethics, an area where we often have plenty of intuitions and few well-reasoned principles! This will provide the normative resources needed to carefully consider questions in environmental ethics, and we will revisit and apply these tools through the term with section worksheets. Section 1b will include a brief overview of the debates in environmental ethics and one of the most important intuitive arguments in the area: Richard Sylvan’s “Last Man” argument. While this course will develop and apply normative tools from applied ethics and political philosophy, no prior experience in either will be required.

Second, in sections 2 and 3, we will consider whether and to what extent our obligations extend beyond sentient life to non-animal nature. If they do, then what grounds these obligations? Are rights held by nature? Or do we merely have indirect duties to nature, duties grounded in obligations to fellow humans? And what kinds of non-animal life—e.g., plants, species, or ecosystems—generate obligations in us by virtue of their intrinsic moral status?

Third, in sections 4 and 5 we will shift our attention to nonhuman animals, analyzing whether animal rights are compatible with environmentalism and what grounds the rights of nonhuman animals. And fourth, in section 6 we will look at an applied environmental issue that has been central in many of our minds: climate change. Section 6a will look into whether responsibility for climate change lies with individuals or with background structures and what this distinction means for climate action. We will end the course in section 6b by considering two questions in climate migration. How do the rights of would-be immigrants fit in with duties to the environment? And how should we understand the nature of climate refugees, including how to define them and who has duties to admit them?

Syllabus

Immigration ethics challenges us to rethink many of our deep commitments and disciplinary boundaries. It forces us to carefully consider the nature of the state and its obligations to individuals. Does the state only have duties of justice to current citizens? If not, what grounds its duties to noncitizens and would-be immigrants? And if the state does have duties to noncitizens, can the duties of the state to its own citizen—duties of distributive justice and democratic control over political decisions—override the rights of noncitizens?

Immigration ethics also requires that we think historically and empirically. How does a history of colonialism and imperialism shape the duties of high-income countries to open their borders? Why do immigrants move across national borders, and often through such predictable pathways? How will questions of race and class—including whether immigration decisions wrongfully discriminate on these bases—affect the justice of immigration policies? And will open borders, or policies that select based on skill, harm poor and developing countries, causing them to lose many of their trained and educated professionals, including doctors and nurses?

These are a few of the questions that we will consider. And while no prior knowledge or experience in philosophical ethics or political philosophy will be required, you will leave this course with an understanding of the causes of immigration, the rights and claims of would-be immigrants, the nature and obligations of the state, and how these all fit together to shape the debate(s) on immigration.

Syllabus | Reading List | Topic Worksheets (1, 2)

This course has three main goals. First, I aim to familiarize students with reflective equilibrium reasoning. Rather than beginning with a primer on ethical theory—one that often either takes up too much of the course or leaves students with tools too blunt for the problems to be addressed—I make sure they understand how to reliably make particular moral judgments, evaluate the relationship between particular moral judgments and ethical principles, and critically evaluate both.

Second, I assign two sets of readings—animal rights and abortion—that deal with questions of personhood, moral considerability, and rights. This helps them develop the tools for thinking about rights and personhood more broadly, but it also serves as an opportunity to try out tools from reflective equilibrium reasoning. To this effect, during full-term classes I have them do worksheets [link] [link] before the discussion where they apply this method to the topic at hand.

Third, and most substantively, I include an extended look at one of the more prevalent contemporary moral problems: structural oppression. Using Iris Marion Young’s Five Faces of Oppression as a foundation, we look at a variety of manifestations of structural oppression, focusing on socioeconomic class, migration, and race. The goal is to provide them to tools to readily understand, deploy, and critically investigate proposed solutions to the manifold forms of structural oppression that will confront them in their daily lives.

Reading List

This course begins, as many ethical theory courses do, with a deep dive into the “big three” ethical theories. Students become familiar with the complexities of Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics through a look both at primary sources as well as several key articles from the secondary literature that develops the complexities and that raises interesting questions about them. Each section also includes a paper that helps students think about applying these theories to everyday moral problems.

Rather than ending with an analysis of the “big three” ethical theories, however, this course turns to look at contract theory as a possible framework for ethical deliberation. We begin with Hobbes and Kant as examples of contractarian and contractualist approaches in political philosophy before turning to the ethical theories of David Gauthier and Tim Scanlon. This shows students the development of the two dominant threads in contract theory, giving them the tools needed to engage in both political and everyday ethical problems.

Finally, we consider three ways that contract theory has been challenged and developed. First, using Charles Mills, we consider whether and to what degree contract theory begins with, and has hidden its dependence on, a particular conception of the parties to the contract—privileged white males—and the idealized interactions between them. Second, we consider Martha Nussbaum’s claim that such approaches cannot handle disability, beginning as they often do with fully developed, equal participants in a social practice. And finally, we look at Jean Hampton’s development of a feminist contract theory, investigating whether such a view is needed, and whether it can adequately address the problems raised above.

Reading List

While I have previously taught the two courses above, this syllabus is currently in development. I see it as functioning as a class in business ethics, applied ethics, social and political philosophy, or as a stand-alone special topics course. It focuses on the various ways that our individual obligations become bound up in, and muddied by, structural injustices. Moreover, it deploys readings for each problem that are either written from the perspective of, or that can best be evaluated through, one of the three main ethical theories. The goal is to help students navigate their individual consumer decisions through the lenses of structural injustice, utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

After reading Iris Marion Young’s chapter “Structure as the Subject of Justice,” we take an extended look, through both primary and secondary source materials, at the “big three” ethical theories. This is to provide students with a sufficiently nuanced understanding of these theories to engage with them substantively over the course of the term. After this, we discuss four different ethical issues that pose problems for individualistic approaches: animals and food; climate change and individual emissions; global hunger and charity; and finally, gentrification and residential choice.

Each topic involves 3-4 readings. For the first three topics, these largely progress from readings where we can emphasize utilitarian, deontological, virtue ethical, and then structural approaches to the problem. This is to provide students both with an avenue to try out and deploy the theories discussed in part one of the course, but also to think carefully about each applied problem from a variety of critical perspectives. Students should leave this course with a sophisticated understanding of issues in consumer ethics, as well as a handle on how to evaluate the feasibility of different ethical theories in the context of largescale structural injustice.