University of Kansas, Fall 2003
Philosophy 160: Introduction to Ethics
Ben Eggleston—eggleston@ku.edu

Introduction to Ethics

Description: This course provides an introduction to those problems of philosophy that are problems of moral philosophy, or ethics. We will begin by examining certain problems that arise when we try to make moral judgments: problems such as cultural relativism (“What’s right for us is not necessarily right for them”), subjectivism (“What’s right for me is not necessarily right for you”), and the role of religion in morality (e.g., “What’s right is just what God says is right”). Second, we will consider several historically important and still-prominent theoretical approaches to ethics that purport (most of them, anyway) to provide systematic procedures for answering questions about right and wrong. In the third and final part of the course we will consider more concretely a wide variety of important moral issues such as animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, and famine relief by considering the work of the controversial contemporary philosopher Peter Singer. Throughout, we will seek not so much to form judgments about specific moral issues—most of us do that on our own anyway, albeit with varying degrees of certitude—but to improve our thinking about the considerations that may count as reasons for and against the moral judgments we are tempted to make.

Class schedule: lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:30–12:20, in 3139 Wescoe Hall; plus a discussion section once a week, with your teaching assistant

Teaching assistants: There are three teaching assistants for this course; here is their contact information:

My office is in 3070 Wescoe Hall, and I have office hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 10:30 to 11:20.

Requirements/grading:

Here are the factors that will determine your overall grade, and their weights:

• two tests: a total of 30 percent
  • meta-ethics test: 13 percent
  • normative-ethics test: 17 percent
• four writing assignments: a total of 40 percent
  • Hume writing assignment: 3.5 percent
  • emotivism writing assignment: 5.5 percent
    • Another 7 percent of your grade will be determined by the higher of (1) your grade on the Hume writing assignment and (2) your grade on the emotivism writing assignment.
    • So, if you do better on the Hume writing assignment, it will end up determining 10.5 percent of your grade; if you do better on the emotivism writing assignment, it will end up determining 12.5 percent of your grade.
    • Together, the Hume writing assignment and the emotivism writing assignment will end up determining 16 percent of your grade.
  • normative-ethics writing assignment: 11 percent
  • applied-ethics writing assignment: 13 percent
    • This last writing assignment is optional. If you don’t do it, then this 13 percent of your overall grade will be determined by the higher of (1) your grade on the normative-ethics writing assignment and (2) your grade on the final exam.
    • Also, if you do this last writing assignment but do worse on it than on either the normative-ethics writing assignment or the final exam, then your grade on the applied-ethics writing assignment will be set aside and this 13 percent of your overall grade will be determined in the way just described. Thus, doing this last writing assignment cannot hurt (and may help) your overall grade, compared to not doing it at all.
• participation in your discussion section: 10 percent
• a final exam: 20 percent

Further information about these assignments will be provided as needed, as well as upon request.

Work will be graded in accordance with the university’s grading system, as stated in article 2, section 2 of the of the University Senate Rules and Regulations.

In addition, I should note here that I take academic misconduct, especially cheating on tests and plagiarizing papers, extremely seriously, and am generally disposed to impose the harshest permissible penalties when it occurs. To enable you to meet my expectations in this regard and to do so without fear of inadvertently falling short of them, I will provide clear and specific guidance as to what does and does not constitute academic misconduct in advance of tests and when papers are assigned. Meanwhile, you may consult article 2, section 6 of the University Senate Rules and Regulations for university policy in regard to this matter.

If you have a disability for which you may be requesting special services or accommodations for this course, be sure to contact Disability Resources (22 Strong Hall / 864-2620 (V/TTY)), if you have not already done so, and have that office send me a letter documenting the accommodations to which you are entitled. Please also see me privately, at your earliest convenience, so that I can be aware of your situation and can begin to prepare the appropriate accommodations in advance of receiving the letter from Disability Resources.

Books to buy:

• , (McGraw-Hill, 2003)
  • Rachels died on September 5, 2003. Here is his obituary from The New York Times (in PDF format).
• Peter Singer, (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Course materials on the web:

Course documents, including this syllabus, will be available on the web site for the course, the URL of which is

http://people.ku.edu/~be75/courses/ethics8

(If you don’t want to type in this whole thing, you can stop after ‘be75’—at which point you’ll be at my personal web site—and then follow the links to the web site for this particular course.)

Class notes, paper assignments, information about tests, and other useful materials will be posted at this site. The syllabus is also one of the pages at the above site, and since it will probably be revised and elaborated as the course progresses, I encourage you to check it online from time to time, instead of relying on a hard copy.

One thing that will not be posted on the web site is your record of grades for this course, since I don’t know how to make a web page that will allow each student to view only his or her own grades. So, to allow you to have online access to your grades, I’ll be entering your grades into the “online gradebook” at the Blackboard site for this course (if you’re not already logged in, then log in here; once you get to the Blackboard site for the course, click on ‘Tools’, then ‘View Grades’). Note that although Blackboard provides a shell for all sorts of course-related documents, I am using it only to provide you with access to your grades; all course-related documents, such as this syllabus, notes, and assignments, will be at the site mentioned above.

Using J-Stor:

Some of the hyperlinks in the schedule below are to articles that are available electronically from the J-Stor online journal archive. J-Stor’s home page—www.jstor.org—can be accessed by anyone, but the contents of its archives cannot be legitimately accessed without a subscription. KU has a subscription, and you can use this subscription to access the J-Stor archive in either of two ways:

1. While using a computer with a KU IP address (which I imagine would be any of the on-campus computers—e.g., in the computer labs, in the libraries, etc.), just click on the link for the article you’re interested in. It should appear with no problem.
2. While using a non-KU computer, follow these steps:
   1. Go to http://www2.lib.ku.edu:2065/.
   2. Unless you are already logged into the KU libraries’ server, you will be confronted with a log-in screen. Log in with your KU username and password.
   3. When the J-Stor screen appears, use “Search” or “Browse” to find the article, based on the bibliographic information supplied below.

Once you have the article on the screen, you will probably want to print it. Look for the gray “PRINT” link at the top of the page you’re viewing, and click on it. You’ll then be given further instructions and links. In order to print J-Stor articles, the computer you’re using needs to have installed on it either (1) the Adobe Acrobat Reader (installed on most or all campus computers, and downloadable free from Adobe; see the link on my home page) or (2) J-Stor’s own printing application (details available with J-Stor’s instructions for printing; click on “Set your printing preferences” after clicking on the “PRINT” link).

Schedule:

August 25 (M):

• Introduction (no assigned reading)

August 27 (W):

• The Elements of Moral Philosophy, preface (pp. xi–xii)
• EMP, chapter 1: “What Is Morality?” (pp. 1–15)

Part 1: Meta-ethics

• EMP, chapter 2: “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism” (pp. 16–31)

September 1 (M):

• no class (Labor Day)

September 3 (W):

• EMP, chapter 3: “Subjectivism in Ethics,” through section 3.6 (pp. 32–44)
• deriving morality from nature
  • EMP, section 3.7 through the first full paragraph on p. 46
  • EMP, section 4.3: “The Theory of Natural Law” (pp. 53–57)
  • David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book III, part I, section II, first four of the last five paragraphs
    • To find the four-paragraph stretch you have to read, use the above link, then search for the phrase ‘But in the’. This phrase is the beginning of the passage you have to read, and its occurrence in this passage is its first occurrence on the page linked above (though it does occur several times later on that page, so be sure to search from the top).
    • To print the passage you have to read, highlight the four paragraphs beginning with ‘But in the’ and then use your browser’s print capability, with the “Print Selection” option. If your browser does not offer this option, you could copy the paragraphs into a blank file in another application (e.g., a word processor) and then print that file.
    • As you start reading, you may find the first sentence to be a bit unclear, since it contains the phrase ‘these principles’, and it’s not clear (from that sentence alone, at least) what the referent is ‘these’ is. It refers to principles distinguishing virtue from vice, or moral principles.
• deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’
  • David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book III, part I, section I, last four paragraphs
    • To find the four-paragraph stretch you have to read, use the above link, then search for the phrase ‘But to make’. This is the beginning of the passage you have to read, and it occurs only once in book III.
    • To print, follow instructions similar to those above.
    • As you start reading, you may wonder what the phrase ‘these general reflections’ refers to. Basically, it refers to Hume’s claims that morality is essentially a matter of sentiment, not reason. (Think of emotivism, and you’ll have the basic idea.)
    • Also as you start reading, you may be puzzled by the phrase (in the first sentence) ‘dear and convincing’. The phrase should read ’clear and convincing’. (Apparently this online version of the Treatise was made by scanning a print copy of the Treatise, and the character-recognition software misread the ‘cl‘ in ‘clear’ as a ‘d’ and rendered the word as ‘dear’.)

September 8 (M):

• Hume writing assignment due (in class)
• emotivism revisited
  • Charles Leslie Stevenson, “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” (Mind vol. 46, no. 181 [January 1937], pp. 14–31)—this is from J-Stor; see the “Using J-Stor” section above
  • Read all of this paper, and don’t be discouraged if you don’t understand all of it the first time you read it. It’s hard. I’ll say some things to help you understand it better in class—things that you will understand better if you have worked your way through the paper once—and then you’ll be ready for a second reading, to be done before the next class, when I’ll say some more things about the paper.
  • For further (and optional) reading, there is a series of papers (also in J-Stor) in which Stevenson and Richard Brandt debate the merits of Stevenson’s view:
    • Charles L. Stevenson, “The Emotive Conception of Ethics and Its Cognitive Implications” (Philosophical Review vol. 59, no. 3 [July 1950], pp. 291–304)
    • Richard B. Brandt, “The Emotive Theory of Ethics” (Philosophical Review vol. 59, no. 3 [July 1950], pp. 305–318)
    • Charles L. Stevenson, “Brandt’s Questions about Emotive Ethics” (Philosophical Review vol. 59, no. 4 [October 1950], pp. 528–534)
    • Richard B. Brandt, “Stevenson’s Defense of the Emotive Theory” (Philosophical Review vol. 59, no. 4 [October 1950], pp. 535–540)
  • Also for further (and optional) reading, you might consider ’s paper “How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”” (Philosophical Review vol. 73, no. 1 [January 1964], pp. 43–58), which (as its title suggests) attempts to refute the Humean-emotivist claim of the fact–value divide.

September 10 (W):

• Stevenson, “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,” continued

September 15 (M):

• EMP, chapter 4: “Does Morality Depend on Religion?” (pp. 48–62), except section 4.3
• EMP, section 3.7, from the second full paragraph on p. 46

September 17 (W):

• EMP, chapter 5: “Psychological Egoism” (pp. 63–75)

September 22 (M): meta-ethics test

Part 2: Normative Ethics

September 24 (W):

• EMP, chapter 6: “Ethical Egoism” (pp. 76–90)

September 29 (M):

• utilitarianism
  • EMP, chapter 7: “The Utilitarian Approach” (pp. 91–101)

October 1 (W):

• utilitarianism, continued
  • EMP, chapter 8: “The Debate Over Utilitarianism” (pp. 102–116)
  • for further (and optional) reading:
    • In “What Is Wrong with Slavery” (Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 8, no. 2 [Winter 1979], pp. 103–121), R. M. Hare replies to the objection—often lodged against utilitarianism—that utilitarianism is liable to condone slavery in certain circumstances (i.e., if the circumstances are such that the harm that the slaves suffer, as a result of slavery, is outweighed by the benefits to others that result from the availability of slave labor). On the contrary, Hare claims, utilitarianism provides a better account of why slavery is wrong than do the traditional arguments against it that rest content with invoking concepts such as freedom or rights without providing any deeper account of why such things as freedom and rights are morally important.
    • In “Utilitarianism and Welfarism” (The Journal of Philosophy vol. 76, no. 9 [September 1979], pp. 463–489), Amartya Sen argues against the welfarist component of utilitarianism: that is, utilitarianism’s commitment to the thesis that, when consequences (or states of affairs) are being judged good or bad, what matters is the amount of welfare (or well-being) in them. Sen argues, that is, that in order to judge properly the goodness or badness of a state of affairs, you need to know more than just what level of well-being each person in it is experiencing. (He does not, in this paper, take issue with utilitarianism’s commitment to consequentialism—only its commitment to welfarism.) Although this paper takes some work to get through, it is a model of organizational clarity, as Sen argues for a series of increasingly ambitious theses, culminating in the rejection of welfarism itself.
    • In “Utilitarianism and the Virtues” (Mind vol. 94, no. 374 [April 1985], pp. 196–209), Philippa Foot argues against utilitarianism’s consequentialist component. She does not just claim that it is not always right to do what will have the best consequences (although she seems to hold this position); she also claims that it does not always make sense to say that one set of consequences, or state of affairs, is better than another. That is, she questions the very idea of ranking states of affairs in terms of their goodness, as well as the claim that—once states of affairs have been ranked in this way—one must always act in whatever way will bring about the best one.

October 6 (M):

• Kantian ethics
  • EMP, chapter 9: “Are There Absolute Moral Rules?” (pp. 117–129)
  • The distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives is fundamental in Kant’s thought. If you want a clearer account of this distinction than Rachels provides (though I think his account is pretty clear), you could (this is optional) look at the first three pages or so of Philippa Foot’s landmark paper “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (The Philosophical Review vol. 81, no. 3 [July 1972], pp. 305–316). Although (as the title suggests) Foot argues against the Kantian (and very common) notion that the requirements of morality are categorical, she begins her paper with a wonderfully clear account of the distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. See, in particular, paragraphs 2–5 of this paper—that is, from p. 305, line 12, through p. 308, line 4.

October 8 (W):

• emotivism writing assignment due (in class)
• Kantian ethics, continued
  • EMP, chapter 10: “Kant and Respect for Persons” (pp. 130–140)
  • If you feel, after reading Rachels’s account of Kantian ethics, that you would like another take on it, you might look at (about 13,000 words), by . (This, too, is optional.)

October 13 (M):

• EMP, chapter 11: “The Idea of a Social Contract” (pp. 141–159)—lecture by Dusan Galic
  • prisoner’s dilemma game

October 15 (W):

• EMP, chapter 12: “Feminism and the Ethics of Care” (pp. 160–172)

October 20 (M):

• EMP, chapter 13: “The Ethics of Virtue” (pp. 173–190)

October 22 (W):

• EMP, chapter 14: “What Would a Satisfactory Moral Theory Be Like?” (pp. 191–202)

Part 3: Applied Ethics

October 27 (M):

• background on Peter Singer
  • videotape on Peter Singer: “Unconventional Wisdom”
  • (optional:) Singer’s c.v. and a site of Singer-related links, which Singer recommends but does not control.
  • (optional:) a magazine article: Michael Specter, “The Dangerous Philosopher” (The New Yorker, September 6, 1999, pp. 46–55)
• Practical Ethics, preface (pp. vii–xiii)
• PE, chapter 1: “About Ethics” (pp. 1–15)
• PE, chapter 2: “Equality and Its Implications” (pp. 16–54)

October 29 (W):

• PE, chapter 3: “Equality for Animals?” (pp. 55–82)

November 3 (M): normative-ethics test

November 5 (W):

• Peter Singer and , “Animal Rights” (Slate, June 11–15, 2001)
  • Be sure to read all five days’ entries of the dialogue, not just Monday’s entry.
  • instructions for printing:
    1. Follow the above link to the document. The document should open in a new window.
    2. When the Slate page appears, click on the “Print” link just above the text of the article. This will open a new window containing all five days’ entries (and may also trigger your browser’s “Print” dialogue box to open).
    3. Use your browser to print the page.

November 10 (M):

• PE, chapter 4: “What’s Wrong with Killing?” (pp. 83–109)

November 12 (W):

• PE, chapter 5: “Taking Life: Animals” (pp. 110–134)

November 17 (M):

• normative-ethics writing assignment due (in class)
• PE, chapter 6: “Taking Life: The Embyro and the Fetus” (pp. 135–174)

November 19 (W):

• , “Why Abortion Is Immoral” (The Journal of Philosophy vol. 86, no. 4 [April 1989], pp. 183–202)
• , “Sensationalized Philosophy: A Reply to Marquis’s “Why Abortion Is Immoral”” (The Journal of Philosophy vol. 87, no. 5 [May 1990], pp. 262–264)

November 24 (M):

• PE, chapter 7: “Taking Life: Humans” (pp. 175–217)
• Harriet McBryde Johnson, “Unspeakable Conversations” (The New York Times, February 16, 2003)
• videotape on euthanasia: “On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (Part 1: A Death of One’s Own)”

November 26 (W):

• no class (Thanksgiving break)

December 1 (M):

• PE, chapter 8: “Rich and Poor” (pp. 218–246)
  • Peter Singer, “Who Deserves the 9/11 Cash Pile?” (Slate, December 12, 2001)

December 3 (W):

• John Kekes, “On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine” (Philosophy vol. 77, no. 4 [October 2002], pp. 503–517)
  • This journal is not archived by J-Stor, but you can access it via the web site of its publisher, Cambridge University Press.
  • instructions for printing:
    1. While using a computer with a KU IP address, go to Cambridge Journals Online, at www.journals.cup.org.
    2. Under “Browse Journals,” select the option ‘Alphabetically’.
    3. Scroll down to the journal Philosophy and click on its title.
    4. Click on ‘Volume 77’.
    5. Click on ‘Issue 04’.
    6. Find ‘On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine’ and click on the ‘[PDF]’ link below it. This will open a new window, using the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
    7. Click on the printer icon in the upper left. This should present you with a dialogue box enabling you to print this paper. It is 15 pages long.

December 8 (M):

• applied-ethics writing assignment due (in class)
• Bonnie Steinbock, “Drunk Driving,” (Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 14, no. 3 [Summer 1985], pp. 278–295)

December 10 (W):

• Hugh LaFollette, “Licensing Parents,” (Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 9, no. 2 [Winter 1980], pp. 182–197)

Friday, December 19: final exam (10:30 a.m.–1 p.m.)

(see http://www.registrar.ku.edu/timetable/039finals.shtml for KU’s final-exam schedule)