This course consists of study of the ethical dimensions of contemporary social problems. It includes reading and analysis of historical and contemporary classics of moral and social philosophy, by such figures as Immanuel Kant, Marx, Bentham, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir and more.  We begin by addressing the challenge of moral and cultural relativism and the fundamental question of the value of morals and morality as it were.  Beginning with relativism, the issue of “why be moral” is considered in the context of social power relations within and between cultures.  Immanuel Kant and the utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham offer two contrasting answers to this question, and Existentialist ethics provides yet a third answer in the last segment of the semester. The basic Kantian moral challenge—to not treat people as things (revised by the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre) will remain with us through the rest of the class as we consider aspects of the ethics of class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Issues and topics include the ethics of capitalism (from the standpoint of a libertarian defense) versus the ethics of socialism, the practice of female genital mutilation, the question of torture, the problems of labor/exploitation and modern-day slavery, and the rightness or wrongness of prostitution. 

 Required Texts:

Benedict, “A Defense of Cultural Relativism”  

            Sumner, “A Defense of Ethical Relativism”

            Bentham, Utilitarianism 

Leguin, “The ones who walk away from Omelas”

Woody Allen, “The Shallowest Man”

Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

            Sussman, “What’s Wrong with Torture?”

            Hospers, “The Libertarian Manifesto”  

Neilson, “A Moral Case for Socialism”

            Ericsson, “Charges Against Prostitution: An attempt at a philosophical argument”  

Pateman, “Defending Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson”

            Sartre, Existentialism as a Humanism  

            Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”    

            Sontag, “The power of principle”  

             Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew

          Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black”