Master 279: Contemporary Moral Issues Proto-Syllabus
This is only a proto-syllabus. (Really, it's just a way for me to muse while developing a syllabus.) I'm going to be teaching Contemporary Moral Issues at UCR for Summer 2013, and I'm trying to sort out how to design the course.
CMI is a lower-division philosophy courses. Many students taking it will be non-majors, and for many of them it may be their only philosophy course. I'm not sure whether those students, as a separate requirement, have to take Critical Thinking. Assuming that they do not, one of the goals of this intro-level philosophy course should be to inculcate and develop in students skills and techniques for critical thinking. Engagement with contemporary moral issues, then, becomes the context in which to introduce and practice these skills.
To engage articulately in reflection and debate about complex issues requires a number of skills. Students need to be able to read well. They also need to be able to paraphrase what they read--express the ideas and main points in their own words. And they need to be able to recognize the structure of a piece of writing. So, for instance, a straightforward argument might involve a number of pieces of information offered as support for a conclusion. To capture this, it's not enough to list a bunch of pieces of information. Which pieces count as support and which piece(s) counts as the conclusion must be differentiated.
Other arguments have a more complicated structure. In a reductio ad absurdum argument, a number of pieces of information will be presented. At least two of those pieces of information will contradict one another or lead to a contradiction. The conclusion of this sort of argument will be the negation of one of those pieces of contradictory information. Notice, this argument is not as simple as A + B + C = D. It's more like A + B + (B entails not-A) = not-B.
Being able to recognize and analyze arguments that have this logical form is no small matter. Probably the first two-to-three weeks (of a ten week course) should be spent introducing and developing some of these skills. That would also be the time during which we would talk (briefly) about the history of ethics. Much of philosophical ethics may be helpfully characterized as being tied up with trying to develop a complete and consistent set of sound ethical principles. Why, you might ask, is it so important that our ethical principles be consistent? Why think that my beliefs about capital punishment touch, at all, my beliefs about the humane treatment of animals or my duties to citizens of third-world countries? For some people, it will just seem obvious that we want consistency. But when you actually try to get it, it turns out to be quite a challenge. So some justification of the project might be called for.
After this two-to-three-week introduction to the course, I think, we could then move to talk about substantive issues. My thought, at this stage, is that we would spend six weeks covering a trio of issues. I've thought of four sets of issues. Conceivably, I could have four different Contemporary Moral Issues courses--each one dealing with a different set of issues. (Or in a fifteen-week term, we might cover material from two of these groupings.) Here are my ideas:
A. Value of life and right to life issues:
1. Abortion
2. Euthanasia
3. Capital punishment
B. Humanity's relationship with and duties to the natural world:
1. Eating animals
2. Product and medical testing on animals
3. Environmental consumption
C. The duty to care for one another; promoting equality and individual responsibility:
1. Preferential hiring
2. Access to health care and universal health care
3. Humanitarianism and charity
D. The relationship of nations and people groups to one another:
1. War and pacifism
2. Globalization
3. Famine relief; the relationship between rich and poor nations
Are you intrigued? At this stage, though, I have not filled out the reading list for any of these course outlines. Terrorism and torture could be dealt with under "D". Gay marriage is a big issue these days, but doesn't seem to fit well under any of these categories. Maybe a fifth outline (E) could be developed that covers issues related to pluralism, religion and the state, and tolerance.
One reason for grouping the topics together under these headings is that that would allow, in the last one-or-two weeks, for us to take up directly the issue of holding to consistent ideas across individual issues. Can our views about abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment be rendered consistent. Does a commitment to preserving the life of the unborn mean that one must also be opposed to the death penalty. Is it possible for rich nations to export basic resources to foreign nations without also exporting some of their culture? Should a commitment to helping the under-privileged and marginalized extend to things like job placement and health coverage?
Some of the last one-to-two weeks of the course could also be given over to evaluating the current debates on these topics. Many of the articles on abortion, for instance, that you'll find in ethics anthologies are from a few decades ago. That does not, automatically, mean that they are outdated. They still inform the contemporary philosophical debate about these issues. It's also the case that philosophy articles are going to generally be more meticulous and careful in their presentation than your average op-ed, blog, or online blurb. So the six-week middle part of the course should be spent working through these richer, more complicated arguments. That should also provide students with a framework in terms of which they may think about the issues in question--whichever side they decide to ultimately come down on. Then, in the last week or so of the course, students could look at op-ed pieces, blog posts, etc. and their task would be to evaluate those arguments in light of the framework they've developed in the course.
Well, that's my ideas so far. Of course the hardest part of this (it feels like to me right now) is figuring out what literature I want to read. The way I would like this course to work is highly integrated. So during the first couple weeks, even though we're dealing with general methodological issues, we still want to be reading material that is relevant to the broad topic of the course. (I'd like to avoid reading stuff that's disconnected from ethics, just so that the students can get a sense of how arguments work, and then jump into the ethics stuff.) Each one of the individual issues comes with an expansive literature. I need to pick articles that are accessible to students, that deal with the same set of ideas within each of the individual issues, that present different positions in a thoughtful way, and that can all be woven together at the very end of the course. Challenging? Just a little.
Well, I'll let you know how it goes. Stay tuned.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
CMI is a lower-division philosophy courses. Many students taking it will be non-majors, and for many of them it may be their only philosophy course. I'm not sure whether those students, as a separate requirement, have to take Critical Thinking. Assuming that they do not, one of the goals of this intro-level philosophy course should be to inculcate and develop in students skills and techniques for critical thinking. Engagement with contemporary moral issues, then, becomes the context in which to introduce and practice these skills.
To engage articulately in reflection and debate about complex issues requires a number of skills. Students need to be able to read well. They also need to be able to paraphrase what they read--express the ideas and main points in their own words. And they need to be able to recognize the structure of a piece of writing. So, for instance, a straightforward argument might involve a number of pieces of information offered as support for a conclusion. To capture this, it's not enough to list a bunch of pieces of information. Which pieces count as support and which piece(s) counts as the conclusion must be differentiated.
Other arguments have a more complicated structure. In a reductio ad absurdum argument, a number of pieces of information will be presented. At least two of those pieces of information will contradict one another or lead to a contradiction. The conclusion of this sort of argument will be the negation of one of those pieces of contradictory information. Notice, this argument is not as simple as A + B + C = D. It's more like A + B + (B entails not-A) = not-B.
Being able to recognize and analyze arguments that have this logical form is no small matter. Probably the first two-to-three weeks (of a ten week course) should be spent introducing and developing some of these skills. That would also be the time during which we would talk (briefly) about the history of ethics. Much of philosophical ethics may be helpfully characterized as being tied up with trying to develop a complete and consistent set of sound ethical principles. Why, you might ask, is it so important that our ethical principles be consistent? Why think that my beliefs about capital punishment touch, at all, my beliefs about the humane treatment of animals or my duties to citizens of third-world countries? For some people, it will just seem obvious that we want consistency. But when you actually try to get it, it turns out to be quite a challenge. So some justification of the project might be called for.
After this two-to-three-week introduction to the course, I think, we could then move to talk about substantive issues. My thought, at this stage, is that we would spend six weeks covering a trio of issues. I've thought of four sets of issues. Conceivably, I could have four different Contemporary Moral Issues courses--each one dealing with a different set of issues. (Or in a fifteen-week term, we might cover material from two of these groupings.) Here are my ideas:
A. Value of life and right to life issues:
1. Abortion
2. Euthanasia
3. Capital punishment
B. Humanity's relationship with and duties to the natural world:
1. Eating animals
2. Product and medical testing on animals
3. Environmental consumption
C. The duty to care for one another; promoting equality and individual responsibility:
1. Preferential hiring
2. Access to health care and universal health care
3. Humanitarianism and charity
D. The relationship of nations and people groups to one another:
1. War and pacifism
2. Globalization
3. Famine relief; the relationship between rich and poor nations
Are you intrigued? At this stage, though, I have not filled out the reading list for any of these course outlines. Terrorism and torture could be dealt with under "D". Gay marriage is a big issue these days, but doesn't seem to fit well under any of these categories. Maybe a fifth outline (E) could be developed that covers issues related to pluralism, religion and the state, and tolerance.
One reason for grouping the topics together under these headings is that that would allow, in the last one-or-two weeks, for us to take up directly the issue of holding to consistent ideas across individual issues. Can our views about abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment be rendered consistent. Does a commitment to preserving the life of the unborn mean that one must also be opposed to the death penalty. Is it possible for rich nations to export basic resources to foreign nations without also exporting some of their culture? Should a commitment to helping the under-privileged and marginalized extend to things like job placement and health coverage?
Some of the last one-to-two weeks of the course could also be given over to evaluating the current debates on these topics. Many of the articles on abortion, for instance, that you'll find in ethics anthologies are from a few decades ago. That does not, automatically, mean that they are outdated. They still inform the contemporary philosophical debate about these issues. It's also the case that philosophy articles are going to generally be more meticulous and careful in their presentation than your average op-ed, blog, or online blurb. So the six-week middle part of the course should be spent working through these richer, more complicated arguments. That should also provide students with a framework in terms of which they may think about the issues in question--whichever side they decide to ultimately come down on. Then, in the last week or so of the course, students could look at op-ed pieces, blog posts, etc. and their task would be to evaluate those arguments in light of the framework they've developed in the course.
Well, that's my ideas so far. Of course the hardest part of this (it feels like to me right now) is figuring out what literature I want to read. The way I would like this course to work is highly integrated. So during the first couple weeks, even though we're dealing with general methodological issues, we still want to be reading material that is relevant to the broad topic of the course. (I'd like to avoid reading stuff that's disconnected from ethics, just so that the students can get a sense of how arguments work, and then jump into the ethics stuff.) Each one of the individual issues comes with an expansive literature. I need to pick articles that are accessible to students, that deal with the same set of ideas within each of the individual issues, that present different positions in a thoughtful way, and that can all be woven together at the very end of the course. Challenging? Just a little.
Well, I'll let you know how it goes. Stay tuned.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
posted by Metaphysician_delta | 8:28 PM
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