Teaching

This course covers fundamental concepts and arguments in metaethics and normative ethics: moral realism and anti-realism; naturalism and intuitionism; consequentialism and deontology; virtue ethics and character-based moral theory; religious, ethnic, and historically-situated moral theories, and some trends in moral psychology. 

The topical problems addressed this semester include situationism, respect and self-respect, and moral disgust. 

This course covers fundamental concepts in social and political philosophy: political authority, legitimacy, rights, freedom, property, ideal and non-ideal theory, justice, class, oppression, and disobedience, and revolution. 

The first half of the course considers great texts commonly taught in the classical liberal tradition, from Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx and Engels.

The second half examines contemporary social and political theories that follow that tradition: Marxism, post-liberalism, liberal egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and libertarianism.  

I teach two online sections of this course. This course explores the historical relationship between Western philosophy and race and investigates the ways in which philosophy can be used to address contemporary racial issues. 

It contains five units: ontology (mostly social constructionist views), science (race realism and implicit bias) morality (racial fetishes, and racist jokes), politics (economic discrimination, affirmative action, and mass incarceration), and culture (ethnic naming, white fragility, and woke racism).