PHIL 157: MORAL ISSUES Fall 2023 PROFESSOR Prof. Rahul Kumar rahul.kumar@queensu.ca Office hours: By appointment (Zoom or in person) TEACHING ASSISTANTS Jessica McMullin jlm27@queensu.ca Tutorial sections: 157-06, 157-07 Paige Messier: p.messier@queensu.ca Tutorial sections: 157-04, 157-05 Isabel Xu: cg139@queensu.ca Tutorial sections: 157-02, 157-03 COURSE MATERIALS All readings for this course are available on the course OnQ page LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the course, students will have demonstrated they can: 1. Integrate content from the course readings and in-class discussions to produce a portfolio of written work that reveals an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the history of moral philosophy that approximately tracks the progression of the course in real time. 2. Communicate their assimilation of a reasonable subset of the course readings and in-class discussions via organized, cogent prose. 3. Support and enhance the learning of their peers via oral contributions to discussions, active listening, or other means provided or required by the syllabus. 4. Reconstruct arguments from the philosophical texts being studied and raise interpretive questions about or accurately targeted objections to those arguments, in written or oral forms as required by the syllabus, at an beginner's level.
2 COURSE TOPIC The aim of this course is to learn to reason philosophically about difficult moral questions that we confront in public and private life. For example: most of us use smartphones, travel for pleasure, eat in restaurants, buy coffee at Starbucks, and so forth. How can we justify spending our money in these ways when we could instead donate it to organizations like Oxfam, saving lives? And why cut off our concern with human lives? Animals are also capable of suffering; we might at least not participate in inflicting it - in which case, how can we justify meat-eating (or not campaigning against our friends' meat-eating)? Is it somehow unfair to give preference in hiring and in university admissions to members of unrepresented groups? Does not fairness demand that merit be the only criteria? What is exactly counts as legitimate sexual consent? The questions we will examine in this course are difficult. Some of you will have convictions about some of them, but with respect to others will be unsure what to think. Our aim will not be to settle any of the questions we will be discussing one way or another. Rather, what we are interested in is exploring what the different values and reasons are that underlie different answers to these questions. CLASS DISCUSSION Learning in a philosophy class requires discussion. This is especially true when we are talking about controversial moral questions. Everyone needs to be able to say what they think without fear of judgment, and to work out their reasons for what they say out loud. They need the space to contradict themselves, change their minds, and express confusion. And they need to be able to listen to one another. Discussion is not stating opinions. It is listening to what others say and responding to the content of their ideas. Disagreement about the questions