Democracy gives people control over their government on a collaborative and inclusive basis, via operational and selectional constraints, thereby reducing the government's dominating power. This set of seminars will focus on why the formula requires control, not participation, and why it gives control to people severally, not to the people as a body; it will explore the operational constraints, such as the rule of law, and the selectional constraints, such as electoral process, on which it seeks to build control; and it will investigate the point of democratic control.

This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film and also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

An examination of the moral principles governing love and sex. Questions to be addressed include: Do we ever owe it to someone to love him or her? Do we owe different things to those we love? Do we owe it to a loved one to believe better of him than our evidence warrants? What is consent, and why is it morally significant? Is sex between consenting adults always permissible, and if not, why not? Are there good reasons for prohibiting prostitution and pornography? Everyone has opinions about these matters. The aim of the course is to subject those opinions to scrutiny.

This seminar will explore how both personal values and public life are influenced by what we see, hear, and read in public media, both digital and on the printed page. Students will examine the challenges and opportunities that today's rapidly evolving media landscape present to freedom of the press, and to the democracy that the media serve. Discussion will focus on where facts about society come from & how citizens can best assess the credibility of individual news reports. Students will craft strategies for determining their own personal media diet and for bringing their values into the public conversation.

This is a required course for the ten Graduate Prize Fellows (GPFs) in the University Center for Human Values. It is expected that the GPFs register for the course in both the fall and spring semesters of the year they are GPFs. The course has three central goals. First, the seminar is designed to support students' dissertation work while providing special aid to the human values aspect of the dissertation. Second, the seminar has an intensive focus on in-person academic performance skills. Third, the seminar aims to help graduate students to work toward the academic job market.

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about ethics, politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe in the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of different thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida, examining how they responded to these upheavals and offered new ways to thinking about the world and how we should live in it.

Current debates over whether a given political leader or regime deserves to be described as "fascist" often pivot around the question: How much does this person or government closely mimic the genocidal far-right movements that took power in Europe in the 1920 - 30s? Such discussions assume mid-20th Century fascism to be a rupture or aberration in a fundamentally sound Western civilization built around the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism. This seminar will disrupt these assumptions, exploring ways that political authoritarianism and genocidal practices have been intrinsic to, and inseparable from, capitalist modernity.

Can questions about what is right or wrong have real answers independent of any sort of divine authority? Are there moral principles that any rational person must recognize, or is morality essentially an expression of our feelings or a product of our culture? Are we morally required to do our part in making the world as good as it can be, or does morality give us permission to pursue our own peculiar enthusiasms and interests? What should we do about deception, unwanted pregnancies, and world hunger? This course will provide an overview of these and other issues in moral philosophy.

The choice of a kind of life involves both fundamental commitments and day-to-day decisions. This course is interested in zooming out and zooming in: how should we adopt commitments, and how do we realize them in ordinary life? What is the purpose of life, and how can you fulfill it? Should you live by an overall narrative, or is your life just the sum of what you actually do? Are commitments chosen or given to you? Are the decisions we think of as high stakes important at all? When should you relinquish what you thought were your deepest commitments? What should you do when commitments clash?

This seminar focuses on philosophical issues related to the moral significance of affecting the very far future. These include central topics on population ethics (the procreation asymmetry, nonidentity problem, and repugnant conclusion), decision theory (paradoxes of unbounded utility, probability discounting, risk aversion, and unawareness), and their intersection.

American law protects racist hate speech, pornography, and (much) lying. Other countries permit more restrictions on harmful speech, should we? Or will that undermine truth-seeking, political competition, and other values? Should speech be regulated instead by social norms, social media companies, and universities? Is "cancel culture" a problem? And what should we - as political communities and universities - honor and memorialize? How should we balance recognition of heritage and inclusion of people from diverse cultures and historically marginalized groups? Seminars will include debates. Active weekly participation required of all.

The course examines major moral controversies in public life and competing conceptions of justice and the common good. It seeks to help students develop the skills required for thinking and writing about the ethical considerations that ought to shape public institutions, guide public authorities, and inform citizens' moral judgments in politics. We focus on issues that are particularly challenging for advanced, pluralist democracies such as the USA, including justice in war, terrorism and torture, market freedom and distributive justice, immigration, refugees, and criminal justice in conditions of social injustice.