PHIL/POLI/PWAD 272.002 – The Ethics of Peace, War, and Defense

Instructor: Audra Jenson. This course meets MTWRF 9:45 – 11:15 a.m. via remote synchronous (RS) instruction.

This is a course in practical ethics focusing on ethical issues surrounding war. Students will debate the moral distinctiveness of terrorism and how a state ought to respond to it; they will engage with key issues such as the morality of torture, the use of rape as a tool of war, how to engage with child soldiers, and our duties to refugees of war. For some of the course we will especially focus on the 1983-2009 Sri Lanka Civil War—we will read selections from Rohini Mohan’s Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War.

We will read much of Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars as well as selections from the Bhagavad Gita, Mozi, Xunzi, Thucydides, Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Henry David Thoreau and various contemporary authors from Western and non-Western traditions.