SEMINAR IN ETHICS ETH401H1Y/POL2026H1Y

Professor Simone Chambers Office: Larkin 202 Email: [email protected] Office hours: W 10-12

This seminar will expose senior undergraduates and graduate students to cutting edge research in the field of ethics, broadly understood. Students will attend 8 presentations in the Centre for Ethics speaker series, given by eminent scholars from outside the University, working in the field of moral and political philosophy as well as policy and law. Students will meet with the professor the following day to discuss these presentations. This year’s topics include aboriginal approaches to legal reasoning, secularism and religious diversity, the morality of cost benefit analysis, Hannah Arendt on ownership and the ethical dimensions of white collar crime.

Required Reading: Two academic papers per seminar talk assigned by the speaker, to be read in advance and available on Blackboard.

Recommended Reading: A Companion to Ethics, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, edited by Peter Singer. Blackwell, 1993. OR The Routledge Companion to Ethics, edited by John Skorupski. Routledge 2012

These are two large encyclopedia type books that cost about $50.00 each. The contributors are all well-known philosophers. The entries are clear, well written and very helpful. I do not recommend purchasing either of them unless you plan to stay with political and moral philosophy. But I will suggest chapters (and post them) and these should also be helpful for paper written.

Evaluation: Attendance: 10% Students must attend all seminar talks

Short writing assignment: 2x20% Over the course of the year, students must submit word 1500-word assignments, each providing a summary and analysis of one seminar. At least one of the two must be submitted by Jan. 21st, 2014.

Final term paper: 50% One 6000-word research paper, to be submitted on April 2, last day of classes, on a topic to be agreed upon between the student and the Instructor.

Any assignments handed in late without medical excuse will be penalized 2 points per day. Late assignments can be submitted to Rose Jones at the Centre for Ethics Rm 203. Plagiarism (“to represent as one’s own any idea or expression of an idea or work of another”) will not be tolerated, and any suspected cases will be submitted to OSAI for investigation without exception.

Meeting dates:

Sept. 9 10-12 Introduction

Sept. 15 4-6 Kenan Malik “What does the History of Morality tell us about the Nature of Morality”

Sept. 16 10-12 Discussion

Oct. 6 4-6 Val Napoleon, Aboriginal Law U Vic "One Way: An indigenous legal research methodology"

Oct. 7 10-12 Discussion

Oct. 27 4-6 Rajeev Bhargava, J Nehru University Delhi (Melissa is organizing this) “Forms of restraint and religious coexistence in Ancient Indian political thought”

Oct. 28 10-12 Discussion

Nov. 3 4-6 Eric Nelson, Political Theory, Harvard University.

Nov. 4 10-12 Discussion

Nov .10 4-6 David Estlund, Philosophy, Brown University “The puzzle of plural obligation”

Nov. 11 10-12 Discussion

Nov. 24 4-6 Iwao Hirose, Philosophy, McGill “The value of a statistical life”

Nov. 25 10-12 Discussion

Jan. 26 4-6 Bonnie Honig, Political Theory/Women’s Studies, Brown “What Kind of a thing is Land? Hannah Arendt’s object relations”

Jan. 27 10-12 Discussion

Feb. 23 4-6 Sally Simpson, Law, Maryland “White Collar Crime”

Feb. 24 10-12 Discussion