PHIL 273.002 – Philosophical Perspectives on Justice

Instructor: Alex Marcoci. This course meets MWF 1:25 – 2:15 p.m. in FH 104.

This course engages with complex contemporary policy debates by analysing the normative questions about justice that underlie them. Topics covered in this course include: inequality, free speech, multiculturalism, immigration, religion, privacy, torture and punishment. Our discussions will be informed both by contemporary texts in political philosophy (e.g. Rawls, Young, Kukathas, Crenshaw), as well as by classical readings from the history of political thought (e.g. Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Mill, Arendt). By the end of the course, students should attain a clear grasp of key theories and concepts in the philosophical literature on justice, and an ability to deploy these theories and concepts so as to critically analyse major contemporary policy debates.