PHIL 362.001 – Contemporary Ethical Theory

Instructor: Jordan MacKenzie. This course meets TR 2:00 – 3:15 p.m. in DE 307.

The course will offer a broad survey of some of the most influential papers in moral philosophy in the 20th and 21st century. We’ll start with some papers that raised significant challenges to Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. Then we’ll move on to read some papers that have broadened, in various ways, what it means for something to be ‘morally relevant’. We’ll close by looking at some topics in the ethics of belief, and by reading selections from Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.

Prerequisite: at least 1 PHIL course