Teaching
Teaching
I am currently supervising two doctoral dissertations. Alice Monypenny is in her final year of her PhD. Her dissertation focuses on the concept of safety in the classroom and explores the relationship between epistemic character development and oppression. Check out her paper "Between Vulnerability and Resilience: A Contextualist Picture of Protective Epistemic Character Traits" out in Journal of Philosophy of Education. Sean Shields is in his first year of his PhD and his dissertation explores consequentialist arguments for our responsibility-practice, paying particular attention to praise and non-moral responsibility. I am also on the supervision committee on three other projects (on ethixs and social philosophy).
normative ethics
The topics in the (second-year) undergraduate course on ethics include: (i) What makes actions right?; (ii) What are intrinsically valuable?; (iii) Doing the right thing vs. Making the right decisions; (iv) Impartiality; and (v) Relationship between morality and justice.
In a graduate course on ethics, we examine the relationship between the Demandingness Objections to ethical theories and other issues in normative ethics, such as the ought-implies-can principle, and the putative desideratum that ethical theories be action-guiding. We also explored what the relationship is between rightness and wrongness, on the one hand, and responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness, on the other.
FREE WILL AND ACTION
In an upper-level undergraduate course, we explore the following questions: (i) What would it take for an action to be free?; (ii) Does an exercise of free will imply that we are morally responsible? and (iii) Can our actions be free in the relevant sense, whether or not determinism is true?; (iv) How do actions differ from bodily movements that are not actions?; (v) Actions are typically done for reasons, but what exactly is the relation between the reasons and the actions? Do the reasons cause actions –
and if they do, can this be the same kind of causation as is involved in ordinary ‘mechanistic’ causal explanation?; (vi) What is the connection between intentional or voluntary action and
ational action? In particular, it seems that we sometimes intentionally and voluntarily do things that we ourselves regard as irrational – but
ow is such ‘weakness of will’ possible?
TWO COURSES IN Social philosophy
The (second-year) undergraduate course is a survey course. The section on social metaphysics examines different social constructionist accounts of gender. In the social epistemology section, we explore situated knowledge, epistemic injustice, and privileged ignorance. We end the course by asking whether there are any ethical constrains on how we philosophise given social injustice.
The upper-level undergraduate course on philosophy of race examines the nature of race and racialised categories. Is race a biological kind? If it's a social kind, does this mean that we should eliminate thinking or talking about race? How does this square with the claim that our racial identities are important? The course also looks at psychological research on implicit biases and stereotype threats. We then ask whether we have good (philosophical or political) reasons for thinking that these phenomena and other cases (such as 'microagressions') are cases of racism in the hopes we can come to a better understanding of racism as well as the impact of racism.
