Comments on: 15 Great Articles in Ethics for Undergraduates

By: The Probe

The Probe — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:17:21 +0000

Since we’re not being purists w.r.t. to “papers” I’d also include the
“History of an Error” page from Twilight of the Idols.

By: One ethicist

One ethicist — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:43:23 +0000

Strictly speaking, these are on metaethics:
1. “Ethics as Philosophy: A Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism,” by Russ Shafer-Landau is an excellent paper.

2. “How to be a Moral Realist,” Richard Boyd

3. “The Moral Problem,” Michael Smith (also excellent overall, but perhaps especially as an intro to the field of metaethics)

4. “The Myth of Morality,” Richard Joyce

Moral Theory:
“Leaving Deontology Behind,” Barbara Herman (The Practice of Moral Judgment)

In case you’re interested in care ethics:
“Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason,” Virginia Held

Not thrilled with “Moral Saints,” but I can’t even take Gauthier seriously.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:14:43 +0000

Just doing some bookshelf reorganizing, so had a look through some old collections of papers ….

Wollheim, “A Paradox in the Theory of Democracy”

By: The Probe

The Probe — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:27:55 +0000

Second on “Moral Saints”. Also Sandel: “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self”.

By: Cara Spencer

Cara Spencer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:56:10 +0000

This isn’t my field either, but I’ve had good luck with Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Liability and Individualized Evidence” and “Causation and Liability” in an upper level undergraduate classes. The problem is pretty contained and students can really see it right away. I did these articles in an epistemology seminar but they could also work for an ethics class.

By: Margaret Atherton

Margaret Atherton — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:34:22 +0000

This isn’t my field so I am just sightseeing though these suggestions, but I can’t help to be struck by the fact that, even though ethics is supposed to be an area into which women gravitate, there aren’t that many pieces by women suggested. Harry’s original list had 3 out of 11, but I’m not sure even that proportion has been maintained.

By: Tony Laden

Tony Laden — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:00:13 +0000

Thanks to Harry for positing this and to everyone for their suggestions. In response to some questions: I will be happy to post my reading list when I come up with it. It may be a while, however, as there is much here I haven’t read. I’ll also post some suggestions I’ve gotten from people other than Harry who I asked for advice.
As for timing, I am happy to take things from any era, as long as they are more or less self-contained. The idea was to get students to really sink their teeth into some really good philosophical ethics and not be constrained by a syllabus from sticking with one piece for a long time until they got it. So pieces need to be short enough that I can assign the whole thing for a class meeting, but rich enough that we will want to stick with them for longer than that.

By: Marcus Aquinas

Marcus Aquinas — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:44:59 +0000

Fascinating topic and discussion. I do not have anything worthwhile to contribute aside from my thanks for some very interesting additions to my reading list.

By: John

John — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:00:01 +0000

The Case Against Perfection, by Michael Sandel – the most humane and experientially grounded piece of accessible practical moral philosophy I’ve read.

The last chapter of Shame & Necessity by Bernard Williams, for its evocative turning of the tables on Plato.

And while I find his views repellent, I’ve had great luck in using Leon Kass’s work on the moral value of disgust to generate class discussion – the students hate it, but it problematizes “utility” and reactive attitudes in useful ways. Overcoming Kass is a healthy and fairly easil achieved victory for the nascent moral mind.

Some of these lists are too one note – if all you give kids is utilitarianism, how are they going to understand what it is and what it isn’t?

By: Neal

Neal — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:32:21 +0000

Singer’s concise but potent tract, “One World: The Ethics of Globalization.” I read it shortly after receiving my undergraduate degree in philosophy, and immediately felt that it should be a staple in both introductory ethics courses and public policy curricula.

By: Joe Heath

Joe Heath — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:44:32 +0000

Useful thread. I should read some of this stuff.

This isn’t exactly my field, but I’ve taught David Gauthier’s paper, “No Need for Morality: The Case of the Competitive Market” with success—it basically lays out the whole argument of Morals by Agreement, with greater clarity, in a single paper. Good luck finding a copy of Philosophic Exchange though. Also, I would do Pritchard’s “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” And Cass Sunstein’s “Moral Heuristics” seems like it would be fun and useful to teach.

I’d second Taurek—that isn’t taught enough. I didn’t really grasp the magnitude of the problem raised there until I read Scanlon’s attempt to avoid it.

By: LFC

LFC — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:42:33 +0000

Re the original post: I’d be interested to hear why you put Cohen’s “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom” on the top of your list. I had not read it before but I looked at it (admittedly, “looked” not “studied closely”) via the PDF link provided by the commenter @3. AFAICT, it makes some empirical assumptions or assertions (e.g., about capitalism’s unchanging need for a proletariat of a certain (minimum) size, about features of British class structure c.1980, and probably about some other things) that the reader pretty much just has to take on faith. Am I wrong about that? Or is the reasoning so impressive that that doesn’t matter? Or… ? (Maybe if someone knows a lot of Cohen’s other work, esp. the book on Marx, that would help in reading this article, but in the course in question you presumably can’t assume they’ve already read Cohen.)

By: Kevin McDonough

Kevin McDonough — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:32:29 +0000

I’ll put in a plug for Harry B’s article on Channel One, the anti-commercial principle, and the discontinuous ethos (Education Policy 2005 or so, I think). One thing I love about teaching the article is that it’s really a two for one deal. In the first half of the article, you get the best arguments (consequentialist ones) in favor of commercialization in schools (Harry does not defend commercialization in schools on consequentialist grounds, but he challenges less careful critics of this position and shows why commercialization is not as easily dismissed as they think); in the second half, you then get the best argument against commercialization (a basically non-consequentialist argument that says school administrators who engage in endorsement deals with companies forfeit their right to students’ cooperation and respect because in doing so they betray the educational purposes that ground their legitimate authority).

I’ve had a lot of success using it in my Ethics in Practice course (mostly pre-service teachers) but I think it would fit well in a general intro to philosophical ethics course as well. After all, even philosophy undergrads have spent far too much time in school before they get to university—why shouldn’t they be as interested in the ethical dimensions of their previous (mis-?) educational experiences as they are about war and abortion?

My experience: Students tend to be either dogmatically anti-commercialization in schools or else naive about the moral innocence of such practices (‘What’s wrong with allowing Snickers’ commercials during class time? Teachers can use it to teach critical thinking!’). The article disrupts both forms of dogmatic slumber very nicely.

Also, I don’t think anyone has suggested Waldron’s ‘Rights in Conflict’.

By: novakant

novakant — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:39:59 +0000

Since such a collection is geared towards undergraduates, I think it is absolutely essential to include a few papers on meta-ethics, in order to make them think about the role and purpose of ethics and to enable them to critically analyze the structure of ethical arguments. The only thing I can come up with from the top of my head is the first chapter of J.L. Mackie’s “Ethics – Inventing Right and Wrong”, but that’s just a faint memory from my student days and I’m sure there are more current texts that could be included.

By: Avery

Avery — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:44:29 +0000

There are a lot of very good suggestions here already, many of which I’d second, but here are some more:
Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom”
Moody-Adams, “Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance”
Sher, “But I could be wrong”
Buss, “Needs (Someone Else’s), Projects (My Own), and Reasons”
Blum’s chapter “Virtue and Community” in Moral Perception and Particularity
I.M. Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model”
Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social Structures and their threats to moral agency”
Christiano, “The Incoherence of Hobbesian Justifications of the State”