Time Schedule:
Stephen M. Gardiner
VALUES 512
Seattle Campus
Asks what makes social policies and institutions morally acceptable, primarily through a discussion about justice and injustice. Topics include: relativism, the sources of competing conceptions of justice and equality, cost-benefit analysis, distributive justice and beneficence.
Class description
This course aims to introduce graduate and professional students from a wide range of backgrounds to some central moral questions about social structures and institutions. Discussion will center on questions about justice, broadly construed as the basic virtue of social institutions. In particular, the course will ask what it is to treat people as equals, and consider different answers to this question proposed by (for example) utilitarians, liberals, libertarians, socialists, feminists and communitarians. As with Values 511: Ethics Matters, with which it is paired, it is assumed that the perspectives brought from different fields will prove mutually illuminating. Students will consider conceptual frameworks for thinking about the increasingly familiar difficulties that arise in fashioning fair and decent policies in various areas of our lives. TEXTS: Contemporary Political Philosophy, Will Kymlicka; Political Philosophy: A Guide for Students and Politicians, Adam Swift.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
