The British Utilitarians were social radicals who questioned conventional morality as a basis for both personal and public choice and proposed an alternative that they believed to be both more scientific and more morally adequate. In this course, we will focus on three of these utilitarians – Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick – in order to understand both the radical force of utilitarianism as well as the philosophical importance of the subtle differences between each of the three views. We will ask questions about the nature of pleasure and happiness; the theory of life on which the utilitarian theory of ethics is based; the relationship between ethics and political philosophy from a utilitarian perspective; and the particular contributions that a utilitarian moral framework can offer to questions of gender justice and animal liberation. 

Environmental Ethics is the study of the ethical connections between our environment and its inhabitants, including ourselves. While ethics has traditionally focused on how people should treat other people, environmental ethics expands this inquiry into questions about how we should treat non-human animals and the environment itself. On what grounds might these kinds of arguments be made? And are these terms — like "the environment," "nature," and "animals," — as straightforward as they first appear? In this course we will focus on these foundational questions in environmental ethics, paying particular attention to the foundational philosophical concepts, how they interact with real-world examples here in Chicago, and what duties we might be under as citizens of this globe.

Karl Marx, whose writings served as a foundation for world historical changes in the collective understanding of socialism and communism, was trained as a philosopher. In this course we will engage in a philosophical study of the most important concepts and theories in his life’s work. In the first part of the course we will consider Marx’s theory of history, known as “historical materialism.” In the second part of the course, we will study his analysis of capitalism, including ideas about labor, exploitation, alienation, ideology, and class conflict. Finally, we will investigate his conception of the state, putting Marx’s writings into conversation with the workings of contemporary capitalism and globalization. Throughout the course, we will also read texts by Frederick Engels and Vladimir Lenin. 

Feminist political philosophy has a two-fold history: both as a persistent critique of canonical political philosophy, as well as generative of new models of justice altogether. This course will be an exploration of the two sides of the history of feminist political philosophy. We will begin with a survey of feminist critiques of the canon, including from liberal feminism, Black feminist philosophy, and Marxist feminist philosophy. We will then move on to the positive accounts that have come out of this tradition, asking whether new models of the state, of the person, and of gender are required in order to construct theories that adequately represent what justice requires in a world with gender-based oppression. We will read philosophers including Mary Wollstonecraft, John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Susan Okin, Alison Jaggar, Christine Delphy, Audre Lorde, Nancy Fraser, and María Lugones.

To what extent does “what we know” have to do with who we are? This course explores the field of “social epistemology” with a special emphasis on gender and race. We will examine classical models of knowledge in contrast to contemporary models of epistemic interdependence, focusing on how the production of knowledge is impacted by group social structures and what social practices must be in place to ensure that voices of the marginalized are heard and believed. Looking at examples from literature and film, we will investigate how race and gender intersect with these issues, especially on the topics of testimony, White ignorance, and epistemic injustice. Finally we will explore the possibility of an ethical epistemic future, asking how we can redress wrongdoing and construct communities of epistemic resistance and epistemic justice.

The contemporary “medical industrial complex” has particular historical and ideological origins that are, typically, kept out of sight. In this course, we will interrogate this context with specific attention paid to the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and disability has shaped and been shaped by the medical establishment. Topics for study include the medical versus social model of disability; the metaphysics of pregnancy and its impact on the ethics of reproductive decisions; gender and transgender topics in bodily autonomy; and whether we have duties of care to one another during a pandemic. Texts include those by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sunaura Taylor, Elselijn Kingma, Gayla Salamon, and Alison Kafer. 

The concept of the “person” has been a fraught one in the history of philosophical study. Both difficult to define and at the heart of ethics and political philosophy, personhood merits close philosophical attention. In this course, we will explore various conceptions of the person from the history of philosophy, including personhood in Utilitarianism, Kant’s deontology, and Indigenous North American thinking. We will then conduct a historical survey of the ways that people have been excluded from the concept of the person on the basis of race, gender, and disability. In this way, we will come to understand personhood as both an important philosophical topic as well as a driving force in political justice and injustice. Texts include those by J.S. Mill, Immanuel Kant, Bernard Williams, Sunaura Taylor, Frederick Douglass, and Miranda Fricker.

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, in which he provides a comprehensive political theory in the social contract tradition, is one of the most influential works in 20th century political philosophy. This course will study this work in detail in an attempt to understand it as a standalone work of political philosophy as well as part of a larger conversation within the social contract tradition, utilitarianism, and economics. Themes will include the relation between the right and the good; the basic structure of society; justice as fairness; rationality and theories of the person; political legitimacy and stability; reasonable public debate; and international law. Throughout, we will also consider some of his most well-known critics from the libertarian, feminist, and Marxist traditions.

This course follows the structure of the traditional first-year law school curriculum – the “1L courses” – while exploring the philosophical issues that arise in each area, typically underexplored in a law school setting. Legal topics include property, contracts, torts, criminal law, civil procedure, evidence, and constitutional law. Our philosophical analysis will include questions such as: What are the various theories of private property implicit in U.S. property law? Is the “criminal” a byproduct of legal systems? Do contracts have the same moral status as promises? What concept of the person is at play in legal requirements such as “the reasonable man,” “making a victim whole,” and the constitutional guarantee of “due process”? Throughout, we will bring in canonical philosophical analyses of the legal terrain as well as critical perspectives from feminist philosophy and critical race theory.

Private law is that domain of the law that regulates interpersonal legal disputes via mechanisms of redress and compensation. It is also that domain of the law that has deep roots in a philosophical tradition of personhood – of what is required in order to reliably pursue one’s ends. In this course, we will study the theories of property, contracts, and torts as they arise in some of the canonical works of philosophy in this tradition, including Locke, Mill, and Kant. We will investigate the relationship between private and public law; the protective effect that private law has on individual freedom; and the oppressive uses to which private law has been put in history. In addition to selections from the canonical tradition, we will read texts by Weinrib, Ripstein, and Brudner. 

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about gender? This course is an in-depth look at this question from the perspective of feminist philosophizing about gender and sexuality. Topics include the sex-gender distinction and its critics, the metaphysics of the social category of gender, trans-feminist philosophy and critiques of the gender binary, xenofeminism, and the relationship between sexuality, race, and gender. We will also explore political questions surrounding the persistence of gender categories into the future and whether they are compatible with various philosophical accounts of moral personhood and justice. Readings in this course include those by Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Talia Mae Betcher, Sally Haslanger, Monique Wittig, and Audre Lorde.