Time Schedule:
J Bradley Mchose
PHIL 410
Seattle Campus
An examination of topics pertaining to social structures and institutions such as liberty, distributive justice, and human rights.
Class description
We will focus on questions of domestic distributive justice, which, put roughly, has to do with the just distribution of benefits and burdens across the members of a country. Regarding theories, we will examine luck egalitarianism, prioritarianism, sufficientarianism, Rawlsian egalitarianism, and Nozickean libertarianism. As for issues, we will consider such questions as whether, in our given circumstances, justice requires, permits or forbids: a federal minimum wage; various policies that redistribute market income and/or wealth; health care regulations that impose a penalty on people if they do not buy health insurance. Along the way, we will pay particular attention to the questions of (1) what sorts of freedom are morally important, and (2) what sort of thing a country is, e.g. (and not mutually exclusively): a collection of people engaged in a special sort of social cooperation, with the government being, among other things, a mechanism by which they organize their cooperation; a collection of people who happen to live in the same area and who must take care not to infringe on each other’s natural rights, with the government’s main job being to coercively enforce certain rights; some other thing. TEXT: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
