PHI219 Ethics: Theoretical and Practical Autumn Semester 2014 Joseph Kisolo-Ssonko [email protected] Timetable: There will be two lectures each week Tuesday: 10:00 – 11:50 AT-LT02 (TBC) Tuesday: 12:00 – 13:50 AT-LT02 (TBC) From week 3 you must also attend one of the following discussion seminars Wednesday: 10:00 – 11:50 HI-F35 [Hicks Building] (TBC) Wednesday: 11:00 – 12:00 HI-F35 [Hicks Building] (TBC) Writing week: Week 7 (10th – 14th November). There will be no teaching on this week. Office Hours: My office hours are Tuesday 14:00 – 15:00 and Wednesday 14:00 – 15:00. B-(TBC) [Philosophy Department, 45 Victoria Street] Course Overview: Ethics is the investigation of the rightness or wrongness of peoples' actions. One approach to such an investigation is to focus on what, in ethical terms, good or bad really means. We might question the nature and status of moral judgements, whether there is such a thing as moral truth or whether morality is just a construct of mere sentiment or political power. These are questions of meta-ethics. Another option might be to seek to discover the general rules and standards that regulate right and wrong conduct. We might ask whether good acts are those that maximise the amount of happiness in the world or whether we ought to try to act in a way that is an expression of good character. These are questions of normative ethics. Lastly, we might examine specific examples ask what in particular makes them good or bad. We might ask whether it is acceptable to partake in sports that put our lives at risk, we might ask if it is acceptable for many people in the world to be hungry. These are questions of applied ethics. This course will touch on all of the themes above, mixing philosophical theory with some real applied issues. In particular we will explore: ● Virtue ethics ● Ethics and animals ● Utilitarianism ● The ethics of leisure ● Contractualism ● The ethics of hunger ● Ethical relativism ● Ethics and social life ● Duty‐ based morality ● Subjectivism about value ● Political critiques of ethics (Feminism, Marxism, Global Justice and Anti-racism) Learning: Each week there will be two lectures. These will involve a chunk of me talking from the front of the class however you should also expect to take an active part – both by way of answering and asking questions. The majority of your student learning ought to take place outside the classroom, when you read and take notes on texts; plan and draft coursework essays or examination answers; and by engaging in philosophical discussion with your peers. The lectures will seek to provide you with a framework for this wider learning, to situate it in the wider debate and help you learn to navigate through it. You will also attend one seminar (chosen from the two options above). These should involve me talking as little as possible. Rather they are a chance for you to discuss and debate your interpretation of the texts we have read. Think of them as opportunities to do philosophy rather than merely learn it. They will help you rehearse the ideas, and form your own objections and arguments, which you are then better equipped to present in your written essays. For each seminar you must have read, thought about and made notes on the required reading for the preceding week (i.e. for week 2 you must have read the required texts from week 1) The course aims to get you thinking philosophically about ethics; to familiarise you with some important writings in ethics; and to enhance your ability to present and discuss philosophical issues orally and in written work. On successful completion of this course unit, you will be able to demonstrate; understanding of, and the ability to critically engage with, these writings and their broad context. You will have a strengthened ability to present and discuss the examined ideas clearly both in written and oral form. You will have enhanced your independent research skills. Assessment: This course will be assessed by means of TWO coursework essays (50%) and ONE two-hour pre-released examination (50%) in which you will have to answer two questions. Essays must be between 1500 and 2000 words in length. Essays are marked anonymously, so there should be no record of your name on the essay itself. Please make sure that your registration number is at the top of your essay. Essays submitted late will be docked 5% for each working day after the deadline, unless the Director of Second & Third Year Studies has granted the student a formal extension owing to special circumstances. (The Director of Second & Third Year Studies this year is Tom Cochrane [email protected]) Essays submitted more than five days late without permission are automatically given a mark of zero. The Director of Studies is not normally at liberty to grant more than ONE extension per essay. After that the standard deduction of marks for lateness applies. Any second time a deadline is missed without an extension an Unsatisfactory Progress Report is automatically triggered see http://www.shef.ac.uk/ssd/sca/progress Essay submission DEADLINES for the Autumn semester are: mid-term essay BEFORE 4PM (TBC) end-of-semester essay BEFORE 4PM (TBC) DECEMBER All essays must be submitted both electronically and in paper form. Electronic submission is done through MOLE, which you can access through your MUSE webpage. Go to the Assignments link of the relevant module, and upload your essay there. Be sure to press the submit button. The paper copy should be submitted by handing it in to the Departmental Office (45 Victoria Street). Your work will receive a high mark: if it is clearly written, well organised and structured; if it displays detailed and sophisticated understanding of the subject area; if it adopts a critical stance in relation to that material (i.e. giving evidence of having been thought through in a critical way for yourself); and if it displays an ability to argue cogently. The following four examples of unfair means are serious academic offences and may result in penalties that could have a lasting effect on your career, both at University and beyond (including possible expulsion from the University). Plagiarism (either intentional or unintentional) is the stealing of ideas or work of another person and is considered dishonest and unprofessional. It may take the form of cutting and pasting, taking or closely paraphrasing ideas, passages, sections, sentences, paragraphs, or graphical material from any other source (e.g. books, articles, internet sites) and submitting them for assessment without appropriate acknowledgement. Failing to properly reference quotes, where it is unclear if you are trying to pass them off as your own words, can be a form of unintentional plagiarism. Verbatim or near- verbatim reproduction of material from lecture handouts, without acknowledgement, also counts as plagiarism. Submitting bought or commissioned work is an extremely serious form of plagiarism as it implies a clear intention to deceive the examiners. The University also takes an extremely serious view of any student who sells, offers to sell or passes on their own assignments to other students. Double submission (or self plagiarism) is resubmitting previously submitted work (without proper acknowledgement). It may take the form of copying either the whole assignment or part of it. Normally credit will already have been given for this work. Your courses should be designed, as far as possible, not to overlap in assessed topics but this does not remove your responsibility to ensure that you do not double submit. Collusion is where two or more people work together to produce a piece of work, all or part of which is then submitted by each of them as their own individual work. This includes passing on work in any format to another student. Discussing your work with others is allowed, and encouraged. Group work, where you are explicitly asked to work together to produce a single piece of work, is allowed. The library offers a online “Guide to Plagiarism” tutorial, available @: librarydevelopment.group.shef.ac.uk/shef-only/research/plagiarism_rsch.html Reading List: You can find an electronic version of this reading list via MOLE. It includes links to online copies of those required readings that are not available in journals (i.e. printed texts). This list is not by any means exhaustive, and you are encouraged to go away and find other relevant readings (in fact it will help us all out if you find useful texts that I may have missed!) For further reading a good search resource is the Philosopher's Index, it can be accessed via MUSE. The bibliography's of the texts you are reading can provide useful starting point for finding further reading. For an overview introduction to the area a good starting point is the “Ethics” article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [ iep.utm.edu/ethics/ ]. Many of the required readings for this course are in either Fricker & Guttenplan, Reading Ethics: selected texts with interactive commentary (Wiley-Blackwell) or LaFollette ed. Ethics in Practice (3rd edition; Blackwell). The other papers in these collections are also worth reading. Each week you must read the required readings, marked with a (*). If you read them before start of the week this will help you get more out of the lectures. Discussion of these will form the starting point of the seminars so it is essential that they are read before these seminars. * = Required reading Week 1 – What is Ethics? & Utilitarianism and the 'Greatest Happiness Principle'. * Bernard Williams (1963), section 2 of ‘A critique of utilitarianism’, in J.